Dan Tan

Tan Seet Eng, also known by the English name Dan Tan, is a Singaporean businessman.

Tan was born on 29 April 1964, and did not graduate from secondary school.

In the early 1990s, he spent less than a year in jail for illegal horse-racing and football bookmaking and, in 1994, fled Singapore after losing US$1.5 million on that year's World Cup.

He returned after he was allowed to pay off his debts in instalments.

Dan Tan served less than a year in jail in the early 1990s for illegal horse-racing and football bookmaking.

He has admitted to having served as the director of the Singaporean company Exclusive Sports PTE Ltd, a rebranding of Football4U, which was founded by convicted match-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal.

Both companies arranged exhibition games and provided referees which have since come under suspicion for match fixing.

Di Martino claims evidence tying Tan directly to payoffs and illegal bets, giving him a "central role" in the scandal; he is known to have been in Italy in 2009 in the company of three Zingari and Choo Beng Huat, a money runner.

Tan's involvement with the company, however, was short-lived, lasting only from November 2010 to February 2011.

He later professed he withdrew his investments upon discovering their dodgy practices.

The span of his involvement parallels the company's failed attempt to buy the right to showcase its players with the Finnish club Tampere United for €300,000.

In November 2010, the 3rd-division Cremonese were drugged by their goalkeeper Marco Paoloni in a failed attempt to throw the match to the underdog Paganese.

Investigation of Paolini's contacts revealed a match-fixing syndicate known as the Zingari ("Gypsies") with ties to organised crime in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

Italian authorities, led by the Cremonese prosecutor Roberto di Martino, subsequently established coördination and funding from a Singaporean cartel, which made millions of euros from fixing matches in the Italian Serie A and Serie B leagues.

He has since argued that he was merely "rais[ing] quotation prices" for his services after seeing Ibrahim Chaibou, a referee in his employ, working at a Bolivia–Venezuela exhibition game in October 2010.

He had been in business with Tan for three years.

The lack of funds, however, scuttled the deal and, shortly afterwards, his associate Joseph Tan Xie entered the Rovaniemi central police station and announced that Perumal was in Finland on a forged passport under the name Rajamorgan Chelliah.

Following a two-hour interview with Joseph, further police investigation showed Perumal berating RoPS players in a café after they played to a draw instead of a loss.

Finnish National Bureau of Investigation detained and then arrested him over the passport on a domestic flight to Helsinki.

(Perumal was a fugitive from Singapore, having fled a 5-year sentence in July 2010 after running over a policeman with his car; he had also been under investigation by FIFA's head of security Chris Eaton for the prior six months. ) Perumal's arrest scuttled the deal between Exclusive Sports and Tampere United; it led to a June 2011 police raid on the TamU offices and the April 2013, conviction of the club's CEO and chairman for related money laundering.

In revenge for his own arrest, Perumal then fingered Tan as placing bets for the syndicate using Asian-based online gambling sites and intermediaries in China.

The operation typically placed a large number of low-level bets, sets of around €100 (US$130) each using different credit cards.

Money was also moved and laundered using Islamic hawala financing networks.

A standard fee for the European match fixers was €200,000 ($260k).

He has faced charges of match fixing in Italy since 2011 and Hungary since 2013 as part of the Calcio scommesse scandal.

Tampere's club has been indefinitely suspended since 11 April 2011 for its involvement.

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An arrest warrant was issued by Italy in late December 2011.

The lack of an extradition treaty, however, meant that Tan could only be arrested in Singapore upon local charges.

In February 2011, Wilson Raj Perumal—the man credited with the fake Togolese team who played Bahrain in 2010—was arrested in Finland and began speaking with authorities, reducing his two-year sentence to less than a year.

Perumal had been given US$500,000 (€385,000) to purchase the Finnish club RoPS outright from its owners but pocketed $300,000 for himself to pay his own gambling debts.

Perumal's allegations against Tan were first made public in a 28 July 2011, article in the German magazine Stern.

In 2012, Tan and his family disconnected their phones and left their former gated apartment building for an anonymous replacement after its location was published by Stern and Singaporean newspapers.

Despite Interpol considering him the "boss" of the "world's largest and most aggressive match-fixing syndicate", he was not arrested in Singapore until late 2013 since it lacks an extradition treaty with the European Union.

By early 2013, he was a salaried employee, an investor, and a high-stakes gambler.

He has a young son and his current wife, the Chinese national Guan Enmei, is thought to be his third.

They live modestly and The Straits Times has reported that his friends call him "Ah Blur" from his obliviousness.

They describe him as "very jovial and happy-go-lucky" and say he only occasionally watches football, spending most free time watching the stock market.

In March 2013, a "Madam Lim" claimed to be Tan's second wife and complained to Singapore's New Paper that he abandoned her and their two sons ten years before.

In February 2013, Europol claimed the involvement of "networks based in the city state of Singapore" in "at least" 380 local, national, and international matches within Europe and another 300 elsewhere.