Einar Bredo Johansen, former head of operations in Norway for Scandinavia’s leading gambling company, Betsson, is named in the Curaçao Gaming Authority filings as the owner and CEO of K8, Atlético de Madrid’s illegal betting sponsor. K8’s office in Makati, Philippines, was raided by local police last year.
By Philippe Auclair, with additional reporting by Lars Johnsen, Jack Kerr, Sam Kunti, Steve Menary and Matthijs van Dam.
There are few more prestigious addresses in Makati City, the Philippines’s main financial hub, than the RCBC Plaza and its Yuchengco Tower, which soars nearly 200 metres over Ayala Avenue. This is where the Taiwanese consulate and the embassies of Australia, Canada and South Africa to the Philippines can be found. The Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation has its Manila branch there, on the 21st floor, where their neighbours used to include the Flying Future Company.
“Used to” as, on 19 March 2025, Filipino police raided Flying Future’s office and arrested “around 200 people of various nationalities”, according to local news website Rappler. The Yuchengco Tower was the den of an illegal “POGO” hub. Diplomats and bankers were unknowingly working in the same building as staff employed by Asian-facing betting operators whose licences had been revoked by presidential decree a few months previously.
Josimar examined footage and photographs taken by the police during the raid to identify one of these operators: K8, the Asian-facing online sportsbook and casino which signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with Atlético de Madrid in November 2024. Though the deal was initially said to run for two seasons only, K8 still displays its association with the Spanish club prominently in its promotional material, app and websites as of October 2026.
Screenshot from the film of the Filipino police raid (l) on the illegal POGO hub located in the Yuchengco Tower, Makati City, March 2025. The message board (r) at the back appears to show the details (in Japanese) of a promotional campaign for K8.
Red flags galore
Legal notices published on K8 sites and internal documents of the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA) indicate that K8, also known as “Kai-fa Yule”, is owned and operated by a Curaçao-registered entity called Westward Way Tech N.V., which describes itself as a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company. Westward Way Tech N.V. also operates the esportsbet[.]io and J9 brands, the latter of the two made Argentinian legend Gabriel Batistuta their global ambassador in 2020.
The Willemstad-based company obtained a provisional licence from the CGA in July 2025, six months after the introduction of the new “LOK” licensing system, which aimed to restore Curaçao’s reputation as a credible and efficient regulator, but appears to have failed on both counts, as evidenced by a recent investigation undertaken by Josimar in collaboration with Trouw and Play The Game.
The recent leak of the CGA database by hacker and German investigative journalist Lilith Wittmann exposed major shortcomings in the “new” regulatory system. In the case of K8 and Westward Way Tech, Josimar found numerous red flags at each step of the licensing process, such as a declared revenue of 0 euro for the years 2022, 2023 and 2024 combined, the absence of any financial data in their three-year business plan and a missing share ledger in their initial July 2024 licence application. All this and more was flagged in the first review of the company’s licence application, but this was not enough to stall the process and, in the end, Westward Way Tech N.V. were granted a provisional six-month licence by the CGA (*).
The Norwegian connection
Due to the illegal nature of their activities in their target markets, Asian-facing gambling operators take extra care to protect the identity of their ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs), using trusts and “straw men” to hide behind. What makes Westward Way Tech N.V. and K8 different is that the person who is named as their UBO cum CEO in CGA filings stands out for several reasons.
First, his nationality. Einar Bredo Feigum Johansen, to give him his full name, is Norwegian. It is the first time that Josimar, which has gone through the credentials of hundreds of gambling executives over the past five years, has seen a national of that country involved in the offshore casino business at this level.
Second, his public profile: Bredo Johansen, as he is more commonly called, is not an unknown figure in the gambling world. He headed the operations of Scandinavia’s No.1 online gambling operator Betsson in Norway in the early 2020s and was regularly quoted as such in the Norwegian press, commenting on the chances of participants in a TV reality farming show, the candidates of a local election or the identity of his country’s representative in the forthcoming Eurovision Song Contest. He was also named as the “Business Development Officer” of Dutch AI and digital solutions business BetSymphony at the SiGMA Europe gaming conference which took place place in Malta in November 2024 (*).
It also looks like Johansen was based in Malta for a significant time, as his account on the message board of the Maltese Jackpotjoy Group, a famous casino hub on the island, describes him as a “local guide”.
On top of which, if the CGA filings are to be trusted, he has also been the UBO and CEO of Westward Way Tech N.V. since March 2024, through a Cypriot company called Apollo Mkt Ltd, and still is today (*).
After several calls and text messages on various message services to Johansen went unanswered, Josimar hit the road. We knocked on the door of the registered address of his Norwegian company Gambconsult Johansen. On a quiet residential street, just over an hour’s drive southwest of Norway’s capital Oslo, outside the country’s oldest town, Tønsberg, a gentleman opened. He had never heard of Bredo Johansen.
Johansen, it turned out, had rented the house for three months in 2022 and simply never changed the company’s address in the Norwegian company registry.
Further calls and messages were not answered.
But where is the money?
As Curaçao serves as the equivalent of a flag of convenience for many illegal casinos and sportsbooks, it is perhaps not that surprising that Westward Way’s financial filings with the CGA should show zero income; but what is surprising is that its Cypriot holding company Apollo Mkt Ltd (UBO: Bredo Johansen, since 13 March 2024), appears to be just as impoverished, when it is supposed to support the ongoing activities of its Curaçao outpost. The financials which were filed with the CGA show that Apollo Mkt Ltd wouldn’t even be able to pay for its gaming licence in Curaçao: the current annual fee for a B2C Curaçao licence is 47,450 euro.
Yet, in October 2025, a Maltese lawyer called Christine Bonaci felt confident enough in the company’s standing to support its claims of self-sufficiency in a letter sent to the CGA and add that its (unnamed) UBO would step in if necessary. It does not appear that any bank statements or proof of funds of any kind were attached to the letter. Christine Bonaci did not respond to Josimar’s inquiries.
In any case, these are piffling sums compared to the millions paid out to Atlético de Madrid. Moreover, before Atlético, at least six other English, German and Italian clubs had been official partners of K8 (*), as well as the football federations of the Maldives and – oh, the irony of it – the Philippines.
Hall of mirrors
The picture mirrors Josimar’s findings on another Curaçao-linked illegal operator, 8Xbet, whose “UBO-CEO” “Ryan Li”, a.k.a. Shuilong Chen, lacked the financial resources needed to sustain a marquee brand in the Asian-facing offshore gaming world.
It is also striking that Johansen only became the official “UBO” and “CEO” of K8’s parent company on 25 and 27 March 2024 respectively, nine months before the old “master licence” system was replaced by the new LOK regulations, but three months after the Curaçao Minister of Finance had officially submitted them to Parliament.
Within months, those running Westward Way Tech and K8 would no longer be able to hide behind their soon-to-be obsolete sub-licensing agreement with Gaming Services Provider N.V, one of the former “master licensees” of the jurisdiction. Even if their details remained confidential under LOK, owners and key personnel of the new licensees would have to be named and registered with the new Curaçao Gaming Authority.
Known as he was in the betting industry, could Bredo Johansen be yet another “straw man”?
The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.
This story is part of ‘Curacao: The EU outpost driving the global offshore betting market’, a collaboration between Play the Game, Josimar and Trouw.
This publication reflects only the author’s view and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
(*) The current licensing status of Westward Way Tech N.V. could not be verified at the time of writing (6 October 2026), as the Curaçao Gaming Authority’s online gaming portal has been offline since the publication of the Curaçao Leaks.
(*) BetSymphony is part of Symphony Solutions, a Dutch company which presents itself as a “premier software provider of custom iGaming, Healthcare, and Airline solutions”.
(*) Johansen is also named as the UBO-CEO of Eastern Way Tech N.V., which operated the esportsbet.io casino until recently.
(*) West Bromwich Albion, Cardiff City, Manchester City, Sheffield Wednesday, Schalke 04 and Cagliari.
