Curaçao consultancy affair raises questions over €3.4m CGA contract

Curaçao’s gaming regulator has now disclosed that Random Consulting Limited received €3,426,406 between 2022 and 2025, not the 8.3 million Caribbean guilders a minister had cited as an annual figure. For PSPs and other high-risk operators, the useful part is not the arithmetic correction but the governance question: who approved the contract, on what basis, and why most of the money was paid in 2025.

1. Mr Charles Cooper had said Random Consulting, the Malta-based consultancy linked to Mr Mario Galea, was receiving 8.3 million Caribbean guilders, approximately €4 million, every year from the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA). Mr Galea and Random Consulting later disclosed the actual amount paid between 2022 and 2025: €3,426,406.
2. That correction does not answer the basics that matter in any regulated gambling market: how Random Consulting was selected, whether there was a tender, how the fees were calculated, which public body authorised the engagement in 2022, and why almost three quarters of the disclosed amount was paid in 2025.
3. The CGA’s own new supervisory board also objected strongly to the regulator’s 2026 budget, to the point that the finance minister became involved and an independent administrative investigation was triggered. In other words, the controversy is not only about a consultancy invoice; it has become a governance issue inside the regulator itself.
4. Ms Aideen Shortt, described publicly as the CGA’s marketing and PR adviser, responded by defending Random Consulting’s right of reply and attacking sections of the media for letting “a lie” be “laundered” into apparent truth. She did not disclose that she had previously worked as a Partner Consultant inside Random Consulting or that she has been publicly described as Mr Galea’s life partner.
5. The current investigation also echoes a separate set of allegations raised almost two years ago by financial forensic investigator Drs. Luigi Faneyte in a roughly 400-page criminal complaint naming Mr Galea, Ms Shortt and others connected with the gambling reform. Those allegations remain unproven, parts of the evidence were disputed, and what happened to the complaint after Curaçao’s Public Prosecutor confirmed receiving it has never been publicly explained.

For Curaçao, the detail that matters to market participants is the one that tends to get lost in the noise: the supervisory board is now questioning the regulator’s own budget and the administrative process behind it. That is the kind of internal friction PSPs notice, because it usually tells you more about operational stability than any official brochure ever will.