UK Bookmakers Scrutinised Over Shared Supplier’s Black-Market Deal

A leaked contract has put one of the UK’s quieter but more influential suppliers under the spotlight this week. Sports Information Services, the company that feeds live racing and esports data into the betting products of several household-name UK brands, has been shown to have struck a commercial deal with an offshore operator that has no UK licence at all.

What’s been released

The documents emerged from the so-called Casino Secrets leak, a trove of files from Curaçao’s gambling regulator published by a Berlin-based hacker.
The leaked contract, an amended agreement dated October 2022 and replacing an earlier April 2022 deal, saw SIS take 18% of gross gambling revenue on its racing products and 13% on esports, running for two years before renewing automatically until either side gave three months’ notice.
The counterparty was Santeda,
an offshore operator whose brands include Mystake
, and
SIS is said to have agreed to provide its services to various unlicensed B2C brands in 2022, including MyStake, Rolletto, Locasbet and Goldenbet.

SIS is not a name most UK players will recognise, but its ownership is.
Ladbrokes owner Entain holds 23%, William Hill owns nearly 20%, and Betfred founder Fred Done holds 8%
, with the remainder split between
self-managed investment trust Caledonia Investments, Catalyst Media Group and various minority shareholders
.
SIS supplies betting sites with live horse racing, greyhound and esports feeds, plus the data used to settle bets
, making it part of the plumbing behind racing and sports markets across the regulated British market.

What’s changed

The arrangement with Santeda matters because of what it says about vetting further down a supplier’s own customer list.
Santeda has been accused of targeting vulnerable UK gamblers and has been fined in Spain for operating without a licence.
Despite that, the revenue-share structure meant
the bookmakers warn of the black market, yet SIS has paid about $49 million in dividends since
the arrangement began, including
£30m in dividends paid to shareholders in 2023.

Entain, which has been the most vocal of the three shareholders, moved quickly to distance itself once the leak surfaced. Chief executive Stella David said the company was
“not a party to the commercial or customer arrangements SIS decides to strike,” adding that Entain takes the relationship “very seriously” and has raised its concerns directly with SIS.
Entain, William Hill and Betfred have all said
they were unaware of the Santeda agreement
, with industry sources pointing to
controls designed to prevent them accessing commercially-sensitive information about competitors
as the reason.

Where it fits

For a site that spends most of its time tracking new slots, studios and casino app updates, this story is a reminder that the content UK players see on screen rests on a supply chain that runs well beyond the games themselves. Live odds feeds, racing data and the infrastructure behind in-play betting all pass through specialist suppliers like SIS before they reach a licensed operator’s app or website, and this episode shows how a single unchecked deal further down that chain can surface years later and implicate operators who say they had no visibility of it.

It also lands at an awkward moment.
Campaigners claim the dividends represent a conflict with the operators’ calls for tougher action against unlicensed operators, and their arguments that further gambling tax hikes must be avoided so as not to benefit the black market.

Entain’s position largely reflects its historic stance on the black market, which has seen the operator appealing directly to UK regulators and football governing bodies about the prominence of unlicensed platforms in its home market
, so questions over its own supplier’s offshore dealings are likely to keep circulating as the story develops.

Sources

• SBC News – Entain “dissapointed” with reports of SIS’ unlicensed activity
• Bitcoin.com – ‘Casino Secrets’ Leak Ties UK Bookmakers to Offshore Mystake Operator
• iGaming Express – SIS Scrutinised Over Curacao Deal
• Focus Gaming News – UK gambling giants called out over SIS content deal
• Betting.co.uk – Operator-owned SIS in Alleged Deal with Black-Market Operator Santeda