Curaçao Licensed the Companies Behind Stake and 1xBet With Ownership Questions Unanswered, Leaked Files Show

Follow the Money's first reporting from the Curaçao Gaming Authority leak says the regulator's own assessors doubted the declared ownership of the Curaçao companies behind Stake and 1xBet and granted licences anyway. The regulator's answer, that it did not reject applicants mid-transition, goes to the heart of the island's licensing reform.

• Follow the Money (FTM) says documents from the Curaçao Gaming Authority's licensing system identify about 800 owners of nearly 650 licensed gambling companies, which together operate thousands of sites
• According to FTM, as reported by Casino.org, CGA officials questioned whether the declared owner of Stake's Curaçao company, Medium Rare NV, was its sole owner, after finding loans and payments to companies and individuals connected to Stake's founders
• FTM reports that CGA assessors suspected 1xBet's Curaçao company, Caecus NV, had multiple owners and asked about its declared owner's links to Russians publicly associated with the brand, but licensed it in 2024 without the answers
• The CGA told FTM it did not immediately reject companies when questions arose because the sector was moving to a new regulatory regime; none of the reporting establishes wrongdoing by any of the companies or individuals named
• The files were obtained by the hacker Lilith Wittmann, who said on Tuesday she had been inside the regulator's systems for nine months, and are being published with NRK, NDR, Jetzt and SVT

What the Regulator's Own Files Are Reported to Show

FTM published the first findings of its Casino Secrets investigation on Tuesday, based on tens of thousands of confidential documents from the licensing system of the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA). The Dutch investigative outlet says the cache includes licence applications, the regulator's assessments, ownership declarations, passports, tax returns and financial information, and that it has identified about 800 owners of nearly 650 licensed gambling firms. GamblingNews, citing the same investigation, put the count at 897 ultimate beneficial owner records for 767 people across 646 entities.

FTM's central finding is about process rather than any single company: that Curaçao routinely granted licences even when applicants withheld key information or when the declared owners' control of the business had not been established. Its two lead examples are among the best-known brands in offshore gambling.

For Stake, FTM reported that the Curaçao company Medium Rare NV is officially owned by Mladen Vuckovic, a Serbian national publicly known as its chief executive, who declared assets of more than $1 billion in information submitted to the regulator in 2024. According to Casino.org's account of FTM's reporting, CGA officials themselves questioned whether he was the sole owner, having identified loans and payments worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from Medium Rare to companies and individuals connected to Stake's founders, Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, neither of whom was named in the licence application.

For 1xBet, the declared owner and chief executive of the Curaçao company Caecus NV is Ukrainian national Ihor Hniedash. The brand has been publicly associated with Russian founders Roman Semiokhin and Dmitry Kazorin, and with Sergey Karshkov, who died in 2023. FTM reported that CGA assessors suspected "multiple owners" and requested information about Hniedash's relationship with those individuals, and that the regulator granted Caecus a licence in 2024 without receiving the answers. iGaming Times has not seen responses from Stake, 1xBet or the individuals named to FTM's findings.

The Regulator's Explanation and the Way In

The CGA told FTM that it did not immediately reject companies whenever questions or uncertainties arose, because Curaçao's gambling sector was transitioning to a new regime. That regime is the National Ordinance on Games of Chance (LOK), in force since 24 December 2024, under which existing sublicensees received provisional licences by operation of law while the CGA began licensing operators directly in place of the old master-licence holders.

The method of access, as FTM described it, was simple. Wittmann registered on the CGA's portal under the name of a trust-office manager already known to the regulator, using her own Gmail address and a fictitious applicant, "DreamCatcher Private Foundation". Within days she was given portal access, then uploaded software that let her take control of the licensing system. The CGA disclosed unauthorised access to the portal and said a forensic investigation was continuing. Wittmann says further material is coming, including claims about Platin Casino, an alleged €250 million German tax loophole and the software provider SoftSwiss; those are her claims and have not been published as findings.

The Reform's Promise Was Knowing Who Owns the Licensee

The LOK's case, made to the Netherlands and to every payment provider and supplier that relies on a Curaçao licence, was that direct licensing by an accountable regulator would replace a system in which nobody could say who stood behind a sublicence. FTM's reporting does not say the CGA failed to ask the question. It says its assessors asked, doubted the answers and licensed anyway. The regulator's transition defence explains the timing, but a transition that grants licences while ownership is unresolved produces exactly the result the reform was meant to end: a licence that signals scrutiny without guaranteeing it.

Every Business That Treated a Curaçao Licence as Due Diligence Now Has Homework

Payment processors, platform providers, affiliates and other regulators have all, to varying degrees, treated a CGA licence as a comfort. If the regulator's own files record unresolved ownership questions on major licensees, that comfort was thinner than advertised, and the firms that relied on it will be expected to have done their own checks. The leak also cuts the other way. It was obtained by intrusion and includes passports and tax returns, and the people named are named because of what a regulator doubted, not because anyone has found against them. Wittmann is already in litigation with the Malta Gaming Authority over her earlier breach there.

The files have given the industry the ownership map that Curaçao's licensing system held and did not publish. What the CGA, the Netherlands and the licensees' counterparties do with it will show whether the LOK changed the system or only its paperwork.