Moses Swaibu gives evidence to the House of Lords on the Macolin Convention
GAMECHANGER360's founder told the Lords International Agreements Committee that competition manipulation is escalating and that the UK should ratify the Macolin Convention.
The session
In July 2026, GAMECHANGER360 founder and chief executive Moses Swaibu gave evidence to the House of Lords International Agreements Committee as part of its scrutiny of the Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, known as the Macolin Convention. He appeared alongside Madalina Diaconu, Associate Professor at the University of Neuchâtel and a Swiss attorney specialising in sport and gambling law.
The Committee's media notice introduced Swaibu as a former professional footballer convicted in 2015 for his part in a match-fixing conspiracy, sentenced to 16 months in prison, and now one of the UK's leading voices in sport integrity education and reform.
What the Committee heard
Swaibu told peers that corruption in sport is escalating rather than receding. Expanded betting markets, including prediction markets where almost any in-game or administrative event can be traded, have widened the surface that syndicates work on. He described how syndicates now recruit younger players, and recalled being approached by three separate criminal groups during his own playing career.
Two figures set the scale. Recorded suspicious football matches in Africa have risen by 92 per cent. In China, nine of the 16 Super League clubs began their season with points deductions imposed as match-fixing sanctions.
"Match-fixing offers a golden opportunity for these syndicates."
Madalina Diaconu, evidence to the House of Lords, July 2026
- Committee: House of Lords International Agreements Committee
- Treaty under scrutiny: the Macolin Convention on the manipulation of sports competitions
- Signatories: 43 European states plus Australia, Morocco and Brazil
- Witnesses: Moses Swaibu and Madalina Diaconu
- The UK has not yet ratified the Convention
Why Macolin matters
The Macolin Convention is the only binding international treaty on the manipulation of sports competitions. It asks states to establish national platforms that gather and share intelligence on suspicious betting, to cooperate across borders on investigations and to treat manipulation as a criminal matter in a consistent way. Forty-three European states have signed it, together with Australia, Morocco and Brazil.
Swaibu's position before the Committee was that ratification would bring better cross-border cooperation, better investigations, better education and better structures around technology.
GAMECHANGER360's position
A treaty sets a standard. It does not, on its own, change what happens in a dressing room, on a phone or in a betting market. GAMECHANGER360's argument to the Committee, and to the governing bodies it works with, is that ratification is necessary and not sufficient: the systems underneath it, from athlete education to secure reporting to live monitoring, have to be built and connected for the standard to hold.
The company's founder has made a related point for a decade, and it is one the Committee will hear again from other witnesses: the athletes who fix are very often the people a syndicate identified as vulnerable and recruited. Prosecuting them without reaching the corrupters, and without changing the conditions that made them reachable, leaves the market intact.
Sources
Related reading
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