Curacao licensing leak exposes the hidden owners behind Stake, 1xBet, and Blaze

A security breach of Curacao’s regulator, the Curacao Gaming Authority (CGA), surfaced tens of thousands of confidential documents and the names of about 800 beneficiaries behind around 650 licensed companies. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the useful part is not the gossip: it is the way licensing, ownership disclosure, and due diligence can diverge in a market that sells access to thousands of gambling sites worldwide.

1. Berlin-based hacker and security researcher Lilith Wittmann accessed the CGA’s licensing system and obtained tens of thousands of confidential documents, which became the basis for Casino Secrets, a joint investigation by several media outlets.
2. The documents reportedly identified about 800 beneficiaries behind around 650 licensed companies in Curacao. Among the disclosed names were Nick van Gorsel, a 30-year-old Dutch citizen and one of two co-owners of Prolific Trade NV, the company behind Blaze.com; Joanna Tinaco Arenas, a Manila-based manager and beneficiary of Novatech Solutions NV, which stands behind Qbet.com; Mladen Vukovic, a Serbian national and the sole registered owner of Medium Rare NV, the entity behind Stake; and Igor Gnedash, a Ukrainian citizen listed as both CEO and owner of Caecus NV, behind 1xBet.
3. The filings around these businesses contain eye-catching numbers. Van Gorsel declared €800 million in assets in 2024, while his partner, American Nicholas Bugge, declared €500 million. Vukovic declared assets of more than $1 billion. Gnedash declared annual income of just under €10 million.
4. The ownership picture in the files does not line up neatly with the public branding of the brands. The publicly known founders of Stake are Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, but they were not mentioned in the CGA license application, even though CGA staff found loans and payments worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars from Medium Rare to entities tied to Craven and Tehrani. The publicly known founders of 1xBet are the three Russians Roman Semiokhin, Dmitry Kazorin, and the late Sergey Karshkov, but Gnedash’s connection to them was not disclosed in the documents.
5. CGA reviewers repeatedly noted serious issues in license applications, yet still concluded that a license could be issued. The authority did not dispute the findings, but said the sector is in a transition period after the adoption of a new law in 2024, with companies given time to meet requirements gradually instead of facing immediate license withdrawals when questions arise.

There is also a process lesson here for high-risk operators and their banks: the leak shows that a licensing file can contain both formal ownership declarations and enough transactional detail to point to different people behind the brand. That matters when a PSP is deciding whether a Curacao-facing merchant is simply another white-label stack or a structure with unanswered ownership questions sitting a few clicks below the surface.