It has been almost two weeks since a real scandal broke out in Chilean arbitration, after audios of alleged pressure to infer the outcome of a match were revealed. However, over the course of the days it was found that the tests were designed to provoke the departure of former head of the Chilean arbitration, Javier Castrilli.
After nearly two weeks of a thorough investigation, interrogation and background collection directly related to the scandal, the compliance officer of the National Association of Professional Football of Chile (ANFP), Miguel Ángel Valdés, determined that the abrupt dismissal of Javier Castrilli from the presidency of the referees commission was organized and that only sought to damage the ethics and transparency of the body in question, in addition to allowing for the dissemination of distorted (or false) material in order to harm certain people in sports activity.
The former Argentine football referee in the 90s, was dismissed from his duties on April 7, after the leak of some controversial audios involving referee Francisco Gilabert, who claimed to have received ''pressure and calls' from Santiago amid a dubious penalty charge in the media match of promotion between Huachipato and Deportes Copiapó, held in January of this year, and which would establish permanence in the First Division or promotion from the second category of Chilean football, respectively.
The prosecution hit ANFP hard and, in fact, forced emergency meetings, where the organization's president, Pablo Milad, asked Castrilli to freeze his position for the duration of the investigation. ''I feel frustrated. They brought me in for a task that I had been carrying out, but the situation and the situation compelled them to make this decision, '” said the now former president of the arbitrators committee moments after his departure.
However, the expert reports of Valdés, a lawyer who was hired to detect irregularities within the institution, did not coincide with the dialogues that Gilabert held with the VAR booth, showing that these calls were part of a premeditated machinery to achieve the definitive disengagement of Castrilli.
Likewise, the stories of Felipe Jerez, Osvaldo Talamilla, Cristian Andaur, and Javier Castrilli himself, who gradually confessed, yielded extremely important data that would end up causing this turn in the plot of history.
''Based on the background analyzed in the course of this investigation, it was possible to reliably determine, in more than 200 pages of the report, through interviews and various documentary evidence, that there is no undue intervention or pressure, abuse of authority or interference by third parties, regarding the decision taken by Judge Francisco Gilabert in the second leg of the promotion, ''says the letter.
The background compiled by Miguel Ángel Valdés was made available to the ANFP Disciplinary Court. However, if the degree of responsibility of the group of arbitrators involved in the controversy, who were indeed dismissed by Castrilli before the dispute, were verified, they could be punished with several dates of suspension or permanently removed from the Chilean referee. Renowned names in the field, such as Julio Bascuñán, Piero Maza or Cristian Droguett, appear on the list.
It should be noted that during the afternoon of yesterday, Monday, April 18, a circular was sent to all Chilean football teams, notifying and announcing the complex scenario. In addition, ANFP was recommended to hand over the data to the Chilean Public Prosecutor's Office, with the aim of initiating an additional investigation into the guilt that could exist for the dissemination or massification of audios without consent, and thus avoid similar problems in the short to medium term.
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