The FT investigates the mystery owners behind gambling brands that sponsor top flight football clubs, uncovering a global network of shell companies and 'front' organisations
Reported, produced, filmed and edited by James Sandy and Taro Yokosawa; Additional reporting by Cynthia O'Murchu, Oliver Barnes, Primrose Riordan, Chan Ho-him and Yuan Yang; Additional filming by Adam Marsh, James Goldman, Tom Griggs, Elinor Bagnall and Petros Gioumpasis; Additional editing by Richard Topping; Motion Graphics by Russell Birkett and Richard Topping; Commissioning Editor Veronica Kan-Dapaah; Executive Producers Joe Sinclair, Cynthia O'Murchu and Paul Murphy; Colourist...
If one was to run an online... particularly an illegal online operator, and you would like to get yourself or your brand or brands noticed in China, one of the most popular ways or common ways is to advertise on European soccer channels or soccer events. We also wanted to know how much Premier League clubs - our clubs - really know about the brands they help to advertise. The Premier League doesn't impose its own standards on clubs when it comes to vetting potential sponsors. It's up to each club individually, and none of the clubs we approached were willing to tell us how they go about due diligence in any detail, so we looked into the betting brands themselves and who owns them.
In this case, that company was called Fesuge Limited, and the company behind that was Xela Holdings. Garth Kimber was the director of Xela Holdings, but getting at who ultimately owned Xela Holdings - that was our first dead end. Suncity Group has been variously linked to triad groups, has been accused of being a front for money laundering, and its former CEO in January, Alvin Chau, was jailed for 18 years.
Everything is like one of those Russian dolls where countless companies are used as screens, companies which are almost always based in tax havens, with the British Virgin Islands being a prime candidate for that. There was a dispute with regards to a domain name called sunbet.com, and that really gave us some very interesting insights, more puzzle pieces as to how these companies all fit together. In that dispute Xela Holdings is described as the corporate and regulatory arm of Sun Ventures Development.
Cheuk Wah was the Philippines' licence holder for three Suncity websites from 2008, and when you look at the shareholders of Cheuk Wah one of those shareholders was also on the board of Sun International, which is another Suncity affiliate company. At its essence, a white label provider applies for and gets a Gambling Commission licence to provide services in the UK market, then it sells its services on to gambling brands that may be based anywhere in the world. And with that, all the due diligence that the Gambling Commission, the regulator, would do into these brands immediately just falls and drops a level.
Therefore, the Commission insists, it is essential that UKGC licence holders conduct appropriate due diligence checks on their prospective white label partners before entering into a business relationship, but, that ultimately, responsibility for compliance will always sit with the licence holder. So in effect, the Gambling Commission only looks into the white label provider itself and not the partners that provider then deals with.
Back about a decade ago, 2013/2014, there was a company called TGP Holdings that half-owned TGP Europe whose owners, the real ultimate owners, we didn't quite know. To begin with, it was held in multiple-use shell companies. Then that got changed and the assets were put into trust. The assets have been reassigned as it were, and now it's been dissolved. So we don't really know who the owner of that company, TGP Holdings, was.
I'm not going to lie. I was pretty stunned by this response. The UK's regulator refused to reveal what it knew about 138.com and TGP Europe's owners, under a Freedom of Information request, because it felt that it would undermine public trust in its ability to do its job. And yeah, after all the effort we'd gone to, it was frustrating to be denied this basic information.
Suddenly, they were everywhere, I mean absolutely everywhere. In terms of the partnerships, the portfolio was unbelievable.One clue was in the Manchester United 2020 Annual Report which describes one of its global sponsors as Tianyu . One of the other important documents was the announcement of a prize draw using Yabo as the trade name, but actually behind it is Tianyu Technology. And this was ahead of the 2019-2020 Premier League season.
Because betting in most Asian countries is largely not legal or has very limited legal betting opportunities, people would bet with someone they know, which is an agent, and that agent might handle three customers or five customers or 20 customers. They don't only meet people in bars and pubs to take bets. They open accounts for their customers online. So it was a local business when it's physical, but then suddenly you can have customers across Asia.
Proxy betting is seen as a way for Chinese operators to take bets from customers in mainland China while basing themselves abroad. Or, to put it another way, to break Chinese law while evading the country's authorities. But is this what employees of Tianyu were doing when they traded as Yabo and sponsored Manchester United?
When they were at their height, in 2019, almost 60 per cent of people working in Philippines Offshore Gaming Operators, or POGOs, were from China, and almost half of all bets placed through them were in Chinese Yuan. Since then, serious crimes attributed to POGOs have quadrupled, including human trafficking and kidnapping.
On the 1st of August, 2022, HTH and Leyu's trademarks passed directly from Tianyu to another Philippines-based company called BOE United Technology. And, just a day later, yet another Manila company applied for the Yabo trademarks previously held by Tianyu. Then there were the company documents. We couldn't find them for Infiniweb Technology, Inc. anywhere in the Philippines, but we did find them somewhere. You can probably guess. The British Virgin Islands. Throughout this entire investigation, the BVI has been the end of the line in our various searches for brand owners.
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