Guyana Football Federation (GFF) 3rd Vice President Dion Inniss represented Guyana at the inaugural FIFA Integrity Summit in Singapore, which was hosted from May 4th–5th.
This was disclosed in a press release from the federation. According to the correspondence, the forum, which was staged in collaboration with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and the Football Association of Singapore (FAS), was conducted to update members on global integrity trends and best practices.
“This is part of FIFA’s ongoing initiatives to tackle match manipulation, corruption, and other unethical or illegal activities by providing education and training to players, referees, and integrity officers. Since his return, Inniss has been directing his efforts towards preparing the GFF for FIFA’s comprehensive educational training materials rollout in June, which will be used to inform Guyana’s football stakeholders about match manipulation. The GFF will also be implementing an anti-match fixing policy in accordance with FIFA’s guidelines,” the release stated.
Meanwhile, Inniss said, “We discussed strategies on how to combat match fixing, including investigative methods. But the biggest thing was: How do we educate our stakeholders – the players, match officials, coaches, and our external stakeholders like law enforcement – to deal with this ever-increasing phenomenon?”
According to Inniss, the summit provided the opportunity to interact and deliberate with officials from other confederations on how to tackle this emerging challenge to ensure the integrity of the sport.
“Underscoring the urgency for proactive measures in Guyana to preserve fair play in football, the GFF official shared that only fifteen countries globally possess legislation explicitly addressing match manipulation”, the release stated.
