Charged with helping football fixer forge passport

A 41-year-old man allegedly applied for a Singapore passport using a photo of convicted match-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal and later sold it to him.

Yesterday, Subramaniam Sellapah was charged for his involvement in a conspiracy, hatched some time between September and October 2010, to give false information on his application form for a Singapore Biometric Passport by attaching Wilson Raj's photograph instead of his own.

Also named in the conspiracy were three other Singaporeans: Raja Morgan Chelliah, 36; Norizan Kamal, 34; and Wilson Raj, 49.

Subramaniam, who is serving a sentence at the Drug Rehabilitation Centre (DRC), faces a second charge of conspiring with Raja Morgan and Wilson Raj, to sell the passport to the latter.

Wilson Raj is still wanted by the authorities here for jumping bail in 2010, after he was sentenced to five years' jail for assaulting an auxiliary police officer over a parking ticket.

Believed to have rigged hundreds of football games on five continents that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent winnings for Asian and European syndicates, he fled the country during his appeal.

In 2011, the match-fixing kingpin was arrested in Helsinki, capital of Finland. He was sentenced to two years' jail for travelling on a forged Singapore passport and bribing players in the Finnish league.

Previous reports stated he had travelled to Finland on four occasions on a forged passport.

In April this year, Finnish police handed him over to the Hungarian authorities, to help with their match-fixing investigations.

Subramaniam's case will be heard in a pre-trial conference on Nov 19 after his release from the DRC on Nov 12. He is represented by lawyer Vangadasalam Suriamurthi and the case will be prosecuted by Deputy Public Prosecutor Navindraram Naidu.

joycel@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on October 31, 2014.
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