The Curaçao Files Name Stake’s Owner on Paper, and Its License Is Still Being Assessed

An international investigation examining over 40,000 compromised regulatory files from the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA)—dubbed the “Casino Secrets” leak—has exposed severe structural discrepancies between the public founders of major crypto-gambling platforms and their official ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) disclosures.

Stake‘s Curaçao license names a Serbian executive, not its famous founders, as the casino’s sole owner, and he told the regulator he was worth more than $1 billion. He is one of about 800 owners behind nearly 650 licensed gambling companies identified in Casino Secrets, the investigation built on files taken from the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA).

The findings were published by the Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money with broadcasters NRK, NDR and SVT and Austria’s Jetzt. They come out of the portal breach the regulator confirmed on September 17. The CGA’s own public register tells a related story, because more than four in ten of the licenses on it are still marked “Assessment in progress.”

The Names on Stake and 1xBet’s Paperwork

Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani are widely known as the founders of Stake. Follow the Money, or FTM, reports that Medium Rare NV, the Curaçao company behind the casino, lists Mladen Vuckovic as its owner. He was already known as Stake’s chief executive.

Internal CGA assessment memos reveal that compliance officers questioned Vuckovic’s sole-owner status after discovering multi-million-dollar inter-company loans and capital transfers flowing between Medium Rare N.V. and offshore corporate entities directly controlled by Craven and Tehrani. Neither founder appeared in the initial license application filings, triggering internal red flags regarding nominee shareholder structures designed to bypass fit-and-proper background checks.

1xBet’s file reads much the same way. Public information ties the brand to three Russian founders. The file for Caecus NV, its Curaçao company, lists Ukrainian national Ihor Hniedash, 39, as chief executive and owner, earning just under €10 million a year from it. Assessors wrote that they suspected “multiple owners” and wanted to know about his “business relationship” with the Russians. FTM says the license was granted in 2024 without those answers.

1xBet and its Curaçao representative told FTM they couldn’t respond to “assumptions” based on documents they had not seen. The Guardian, which also reported on the files, said it had approached Stake for comment and that BC.Game appears in the leak too.

Blaze’s Owners Declared Hundreds of Millions

Blaze.com, the Brazil-facing casino once promoted by Neymar, belongs on paper to two 30-year-olds. Dutchman Nick van Gorsel declared assets of €800 million to the regulator and American Nicholas Beugg declared €500 million, FTM reports. Neither answered its questions.

Qbet’s owner of record is a 42-year-old tech manager in Manila. The Dutch regulator fined its company, Novatech Solutions, nearly €25 million in March for operating illegally in the Netherlands, and Novatech has appealed.

Licensed First, Questions Later

Forensic accountancy experts, including Professor Marcel Pheijffer of Nyenrode Business University, characterized the CGA’s historical approval patterns as an administrative breakdown, noting that regulatory assessors regularly granted operational permits on the condition that mandatory UBO verification and source-of-wealth documentation be submitted retroactively—conditions that were rarely enforced.

The CGA didn’t dispute that it granted licenses with ownership questions still open. It told FTM that “it was decided not to implement all requirements at once, but to give companies the opportunity to comply with them step by step.” In a September 22 statement, it said it does not find it prudent to judge its licensing “by looking at separate documents.”

The ownership data itself is broad. FTM manually verified 897 ownership records covering 767 people, most of them European, with the largest groups linked to Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Cyprus. About 30 trust offices on the island represent the companies, and at 94% of the firms examined at least one director was Dutch.

What the Public Register Shows

One part of this can be checked without the leak. The CGA publishes its online gaming license registry, and the September 21 edition lists 665 entries. Of those, 281, or about 42%, are marked “Assessment in progress,” and 276 of them carry a printed expiry date that had already passed.

Medium Rare is one of them. Its entry shows a license issued on December 9, 2025, expiring June 9, 2026, with the status “Assessment in progress.” Caecus and Prolific Trade, the company behind Blaze, are both listed as “Indefinite.” So are 207 licenses in total, and 163 of those share one issue date, December 24, 2025, a year to the day after Curaçao’s new gambling law took effect.

The register doesn’t explain what “Assessment in progress” means for a license past its printed date, and a passed date is not proof that an operator is unlicensed. The regulator’s separate enforcement register lists 32 actions, made up of 31 revocations and one license it did not extend. Novatech’s revocation, dated May 22, is on it.

The Files Stay Public

The leaked documents are still online. The Casino Secrets archive invites readers to search more than 40,000 documents, and the researcher who took them, Lilith Wittmann, is still fighting Malta’s regulator in a Berlin court over an earlier breach. The CGA calls her access “a serious breach under Curacao law” and says it will report it to the authorities.

Jan van Koningsveld, an offshore finance expert who examined the Stake recommendation for FTM, said the regulator could “be expected to carry out an in-depth investigation and exercise ongoing supervision.” On September 21, 104 days after the expiry date printed beside it, Medium Rare’s entry still read “Assessment in progress.”