FIFA official Jerome Valcke: 'Match-fixing is a soccer disease'

Match-fixing is a "disease" that could kill football, a top official at the sport's world governing body told CNN on Wednesday.

Earlier this month FIFA handed lifetime bans to 41 South Korean players who had been involved in prearranging matches.

It followed December's suspension of the president of the South African Football Association ahead of an investigation into match-fixing in the country prior to it hosting the 2010 World Cup.

"I really think that it's a disease and a threat which is on a worldwide basis," FIFA's general secretary Jerome Valcke told CNN in an exclusive interview."It's not just about Africa. It is in Asia, it is in Europe, it is in North America, it is in Canada, it is in South America. It's all around the world that this match-fixing, or match manipulation, is active."Valcke was speaking after European football chief Michel Platini branded match-fixing the greatest threat to the future of football in an interview with a French radio station.

Platini had warned that football is "dead" if the outcome of matches is prearranged, a statement Valcke echoed by saying the appeal of the sport lies in its unpredictability.

"If you know the end of the party, of the game, then definitely football is dead," he said. "That's the beauty of the game, you never know who will be the winner.

"It can be the team you think would win, but it can also be the other team, the opponent who can make it because it's just played on one goal. So that's why we have to protect football as much as we can."

Valcke warned that the fight against the highly lucrative match-fixing business could take 10 years, and urged anyone with knowledge of such activity to come forward.In May 2011 FIFA announced it would donate over $25 million to Interpol over 10 years -- the largest grant the world police organization had ever received from a private body -- with a view to tackling corruption.

"When I was in Rome where we had this meeting with Interpol and 50 of the 53 of the European associations, I heard that the business of match manipulation per year is around 100 billion. I don't know it is in Euros or U.S. (dollars), but whatever, it is 100 billion, it's an amazing figure," Valcke said.

"I think it will be a very, very long fight and it will be very difficult to win. And if we want to win, it is all together. Also I told some media in South Africa, if you are aware of anything you should tell us. We have to fight all.

"All the people who love football should be together towards match-fixing. But it will not be a fight of one day as we have other fights which have been there already. And match manipulation will be another fight that will be there for the next decade."

Former Interpol director Ralf Mutschke replaced FIFA's former head of security Chris Eaton -- who joined a Qatar-based sports security consultancy -- in June last year, tasked with tackling the scourge of match-fixing.

In the past FIFA's own governance has been questioned. Corruption watchdog Transparency International cut its ties with the body in 2011 when two of its recommendations -- that the investigator charged with overseeing FIFA would be compromised if he was paid by FIFA and that he should be allowed to investigate old corruption scandals -- were dropped.

"There is no limit in what we have to do in order to make sure we can eradicate match-fixing one day in our game," Valcke said. "Or at least to make sure that match-fixing is not a threat anymore to our game."

Canadian companies feel the world's pain

TORONTO -- Financial results from Canada's biggest companies are likely to disappoint investors in the coming weeks with weak global growth and mixed commodity prices expected to have pummeled the quarterly earnings of oil companies and miners.

Energy and materials shares make up about half of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange's benchmark S&P/TSX composite index and include such blue chips as Suncor Energy Inc, Teck Resources Ltd and Goldcorp Inc.

All three companies are expected to post year-on-year drops in fourth-quarter earnings per share when they report in February.

Overall, companies in the TSX are expected to report quarterly earnings growth of only 0.3 percent from a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine SmartEstimates. Analysts see full-year 2012 earnings dropping 1.4 percent, but they expect profits to climb around 9 percent next year.

"This earnings season might be a mild disappointment in some cases, or a mild disappointment overall," said George Vasic, chief economist and strategist at UBS Securities Canada.
 

Vasic noted that TSX valuations are higher than they were last year, increasing the risk that stock prices could fall on negative news. He said investors will be especially sensitive to earnings outlooks, and that capital spending plans will be scrutinized.

In the United States, where the fourth-quarter earnings season is already well underway, shares of such top financials as Bank of America and Citigroup have fallen on disappointing results.

By the time reporting is done, S&P 500 fourth-quarter earnings are expected to have increased just 2.5 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data, but that is still far better than what is expected from TSX companies.

Philip Petursson, a managing director of the portfolio advisory group at Manulife Asset Management, said the market has already priced some negative news into Canadian share prices.

Even so, he said, "you can have a couple of shocks that will take things a little bit lower".

TSX TO LAG S&P 500 ONCE AGAIN?

With the global economy struggling because of political gridlock in Washington, Europe's debt crisis, and a slowdown in Asia toward the end of last year, it's little wonder that growth-sensitive sectors such as energy and materials were the worst performers on the Canadian market in 2012.

Toronto's S&P/TSX composite put in a much weaker performance last year than the more-diversified S&P 500 index. The TSX was up 4 percent in 2012, while the S&P gained 13.4 percent.

Many analysts see the trend extending into 2013. The TSX is expected to rise about 4.5 percent in 2013, while the S&P is seen doubling that at 9 percent, according to Reuters polls.

Global economic weakness has translated into weak commodity prices, particularly for energy. As a result, oil and gas producers are expected to show an earnings decline of 18 percent in the fourth quarter, according to Thomson Reuters data.

But Canadian-specific issues are hitting domestic producers as well. With limited capacity to move Canadian crude oil abroad, crude pumped out of Alberta and other provinces sells at a steep discount to international prices, especially for heavier grades.

"Commodity prices and oil we think are going to be more flat over the next year or so and that's going to be a tremendous headwind for the energy sector," said Shailesh Kshatriya, senior investment analyst at Russell Investments Canada.

MINERS DRAG, FINANCIALS UNDERWHELM

The TSX index's materials sector, home to miners of potash and industrial and precious metals, is expected to have had profit growth of just 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter.

But commodity prices are not entirely to blame for this. The price of spot gold, which traded around $1,686.10 an ounce on Friday, is up from a year earlier. Yet shares of Canadian precious metal miners lost 16 percent last year.

"As these companies find more gold, it's getting more and more costly to pull it out and get it out of the ground," said Allan Small, senior investment adviser at DundeeWealth, noting that a similar problem for oil companies has caused their stocks to lag the commodity prices.

Even shares of Canada's still-healthy banks, which don't start reporting results until late February, could start to lag after performing relatively well since the 2008-09 global recession.

"We're looking for low single-digit kind of gains for the reasons that pretty much everybody knows - the slowdown in the housing market and then the mortgages," said John Kinsey, portfolio manager at Caldwell Securities.

Analysts expect banks' loan losses could increase because Canadian household debt is near record highs.

"The saving grace I guess is the dividends," he added. All of Canada's six biggest banks trade with dividend yields of more than 3 percent, a level that is expected to support their stock prices even if the earnings outlook darkens.

7.5-magnitude earthquake strikes off coast of Alaska

A tsunami warning was canceled early Saturday for portions of British Columbia, Canada, and southeastern Alaska, officials said.

The warning was issued following a 7.5-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Alaska 63 miles west of Craig, a town on Prince of Wales Island, and 208 miles south of the capital of Juneau, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The size of the temblor, which struck at 3:58 a.m. ET, off the coast of Alaska was downgraded by the USGS from 7.7 to 7.5.

There were no initial reports of damage but the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said a small tsunami of about six inches was observed near the southeastern Alaskan town of Port Alexander on Baranof Island.

A tsunami watch for the coastal areas of the British Columbia-Washington border was also canceled.

Based on available data, the tsunami warning center said there is "no destructive threat" to Hawaii, though it warned that some coastal areas could experience larger waves and strong currents.

On October 27, a tsunami was spawned by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck 86 miles south of Masset on British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands.

The tsunami reached all the way to Hawaii, where sirens were sounded to warn residents to get to higher ground. Visions of the devastating quake and tsunami that killed thousands in Japan in March 2011 fueled the fright, but the waves proved to be smaller and less powerful than feared.

While the warning at the time said waves could surge between 3 and 6 feet, the largest wave, measured in Kahului on the island of Maui, was about 2.5 feet above ambient sea level.