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As for Poland, it all started back in 2005 when the police authorities in
Wroclaw started to investigate allegations of match-fixing in the Polish
football championship. As is the case grew bigger, political officials have
uncovered 29 clubs from the Polish league directly involved in match-fixing in
the season 2004/05, and even in previous years. During the campaign 117
people were accused of match-fixing, bribing referees and players, and
illegal operations and running of football clubs.
In the center of the scandal was then president of the Polish Football
Association Michal Listkiewicz who, as a leading figure of the highest official
football organization in Poland, had to face the consequences. He was a
former football referee elected for president of the Polish Football Association
in 1999, around the same time as the most powerful football administrator
of today - Sepp Blatter. Michal Listkiewicz was known as a bon vivant and
could be seen, in many occasions, following the matches with a cigar in his
mouth.
Before the official accusations of the match-fixing at the beginning of
2006, Ministry of Sport of the Republic of Poland officials warned the Football
Association to pay more attention to the events in Polish football because it
was clear that the matches have been fixed and that those criminal activities
have a much broader scope than previously thought. Michal Listkiewicz was
not taking any notice of this suggestion. When Wit elazko, one of the
members of the Polish Football Association, was arrested in 2007 the secret
behind the match-fixing had started to unravel. FIFA has sided with the Polish
Football Association under the motto that no one should interfere in the
internal affairs of the League, but Polish Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski,
thought differently. Although a big fan of football he wanted to get in the way
of football crime and to break Polish football away from the hands of the
mafia, even at the cost of losing the football as a game and leaving hundreds
of thousands of people disappointed.