Agent Dejan Veljkovic, who is seen by the Belgian judiciary as one of the main players in the sizeable bribery scandal that has been keeping the country under control for weeks, had hundreds of phone talks with two top referees, according to the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, whose journalists have been allowed to see the file. The recording of the telephone conversations conducted by the Serbian players' agent with referees outline a disconcerting picture, according to Het Laatste Nieuws. Veljkovic had frequent contact with Sébastien Delferière and Bart Vertenten, the two referees who are suspected of match fixing. The players' agent called Vertenten a dozen of times within a few months. With Delferière, the contact was even more intensive: hundreds of phone calls were recorded. For months they called each other more than once a day.
Questionable penalty
In the recorded conversations, the agent never explicitly asked them to influence matches ("You never know who is listening in", he warned several times), but his words seem to leave little to the imagination. "The most important thing is that Antwerp wins," Veljkovic would have said to Vertenten, for example, two days before he was the referee in the relegation duel of Antwerp with Eupen. Vertenten gave Antwerp a questionable penalty and that same evening Veljkovic called that "fantastic" to the financial director of KV Mechelen, another club in relegation distress, where Veljkovic had several players at that time. The tapes would also show that Delferière prevented a suspension for Sofiane Hanni, one of the players from Veljkovic's group. "I will try to make sure he is not suspended," said the referee over the phone. Hanni was indeed not suspended.
In exchange for their 'services', Vertenten and Delferière received money and expensive gifts from Veljkovic, according to the Belgian justice system. Vertenten has been retained since his arrest on 10 October 2018. His lawyers have doubts about the representation of the talks by the judiciary. Delferière has been released after interrogation, but is still part of the investigation of justice. The Belgian Football Federation decided to replace Delferière and Vertenten on the FIFA List with Bram Van Driessche (33) and Nathan Verboomen (30), as of 1 January 2019.
Source: NOS
