ZURICH - THE global sports industry needs an international agency to fight illegal gambling and match-fixing, betting experts said on Monday.

Corrupt betting - worth tens of billions of dollars each year to criminal gangs - ranks alongside doping as the biggest threat to the integrity of sport, speakers said at a conference in Switzerland.

Investigators said they need an equivalent of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to coordinate the fight against illegal bookmakers and syndicates attempting to fix matches and races.

Gaming companies said they wanted global sports organisations - like Fifa and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) - to help persuade lawmakers to open up and regulate national betting markets.

'Fifa and the IOC obviously have huge power deciding which countries will receive the next World Cup or Olympic Games,' said Mr Norbert Teufelberger, chief executive of online operator Bwin International. 'Our idea would be that only countries with a modern, regulated sports betting regime can be part of that family and organise those events.'

The sports betting conference was hosted by Early Warning System (EWS), a Zurich-based firm which monitors suspicious gambling on football's World Cup and the Summer Olympics.

EWS, which was created by Fifa to look for match-fixing attempts during qualifying for the 2010 tournament, shares information with more than 400 betting operators worldwide. It was asked by the IOC to track betting patterns during the Beijing Games.

The prestige of the games meant the integrity of the Olympics was 'almost totally protected', said Mr Paquerette Girard Zapelli, secretary of the IOC Ethics Commission.

Betting patterns from Beijing are being analysed to predict how gambling might affect the 2012 London Games. Ice hockey and skiing have also been identified as likely popular betting sports at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, Mr Zapelli said.

EWS head of strategy Wolfgang Feldner said doping and corrupt betting were the two biggest challenges confronting sports. He said 'a worldwide organisation which is monitoring betting and analysing in a central system' was needed.

Mr Feldner said online gambling - an industry worth US$20 billion (S$30 billion) in 2008 - and new types of wagers in betting exchanges had made the business of betting faster and tougher to track.

'A potential cheater knows he can bring lot of money into the market in a short time,' Mr Feldner said.

The sports betting industry believes legalised gambling is needed to track wagers and keep information on clients.

'Prohibition drives customers into the black markets,' Mr Teufelberger said, pointing to a US ban on online gaming in 2006. 'We have respected the rules but we are lobbying to reopen the market.'

A University of Beijing study estimated US$90 billion is bet illegally in China each year.

Mr Lawrence Wong of the international police intelligence agency Interpol said crime syndicates linked to money laundering and forced prostitution operations controlled 95 per cent of the Asian trade in illegal gambling on football matches.

'You cannot set a limit on international co-operation,' Mr Wong said. -- AP