Khaberni - Yasir Kol, a referee in the Turkish Premier League, was suspended after being interrogated by the public prosecutor and referred to the on-call misdemeanor judge with a request for his detention.
The assistant referee, Goktug Hazar Irel, was also suspended and sent to jail on charges of forging an official document while investigations revealed financial transfers that coincided with match dates.
The investigations, which included the movement of bank accounts linked to 41 IBAN numbers, alongside the match schedule and digital correspondence, revealed that the initial estimate of the transfer value was 135 million Turkish Lira.
After discovering some duplicate entries and excluding the repeated transactions, the calculated amount was revised down to 84 million and 181 thousand Lira.
The final figure is approximately divided between 34.5 million Lira resulting from transfers between Kol's own accounts and about 49.5 million Lira sent to third parties.
The key focus of the case was the synchronization between the transfers and the match dates in which the referee participated: 50 financial transactions were recorded with referees who officiated in the same matches, and these transactions occurred from three days before the match to two days after it.
Out of these 50 transactions, 47 transfers were sent by Kol to other referees, in 44 of which, Kol was the referee of the match while the beneficiaries were assistant referees or fourth officials. More notably, 40 out of these 47 transfers were executed after the match had started.
An expert conducted statistical analysis to determine whether this synchronization was random and when the match schedule was shifted or delayed in 24 different ways, the average number of transactions that coincided with the same intervals was 3.71, with the maximum reaching 8. In the actual schedule, the number was 50 transactions.
The report concluded that this concentration is associated with the matches to a degree that cannot be explained by random distribution, but it also noted that the purpose of the payments could not be determined through banking data.
