Fifa’s new prediction market partner Adi Predictstreet’s cast of controversial characters keeps growing: in 2018, its new Money Laundering Reporting Officer Colin Piri accepted a two-year ban from Gibraltar’s financial watchdog over his then-employer’s AML shortcomings.
By Martin Calladine, additional reporting by Philippe Auclair and Sam Kunti.
This is the third part of Josimar’s investigation into Fifa’s partnership with Predictstreet. The first part detailed how Predictstreet had no working product, operated without licence outside Gibraltar and was overseen by someone who paid a six-figure sum to settle accusations of insider trading. The second part revealed the company’s new CEO’s ties to one of the biggest lobbying scandals in EU history.
Blank slate partner
Fifa’s partners tend to be global brands, behemoths in their industries – Adidas, Visa, Coca-Cola and Hyundai-Kia. In early April, a new name joined their exalted ranks: Predictstreet. The prediction market platform is brand new, so much so that it currently has no working product, registered its website in late January and received regulatory approval only in late March.
Predictstreet, Linkedin suggests, is a tiny outfit, with between 51 and 200 employees – and even that seems a stretch. Linkedin currently shows only three people employed by Predictstreet. There is a senior executive at Predictstreet’s parent company, the giant investment firm owned by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. The other two employees joined the company last week: Dimitrios Psarrakis, the new CEO, who was connected to Eva Kaili of the Qatargate scandal, and Colin Piri.
Piri has been working in anti-money laundering for 20 years, first through his work for the Gibraltar police, where, according to his LinkedIn resume, he “[provided] training and awareness to Gibraltar Financial Institutions on Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism” and then for 15 years in the private sector. Between 2011 and 2018, he worked for Wave Crest Holdings Limited, a fintech company which, among other things, issued pre-paid cryptocurrency cards. Piri departed the company under a cloud in 2018, when he was one of three people, the others being Wave Crest’s CEO and its non-executive chair, to be named in an investigation by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC). The company was fined £250,000 for anti-money laundering failings.
As part of the settlement, Piri accepted a two-year ban on taking any senior financial services role in Gibraltar “unless and until” he first undertook additional AML training and satisfied the GFSC that he would then meet “the required standards.” According to the settlement, the GFSC didn’t make “any adverse finding as to Mr Piri’s fitness and propriety.”
Not rock solid
At present, Predictstreet’s gambling services are legal only in Gibraltar, which has fewer than 40,000 residents. The company is not even licensed in the United Arab Emirates, despite the ownership of the Abu Dhabi royal family through its sovereign wealth fund. In practice, Fifa’s World Cup partner is de facto illegal in almost all jurisdictions, and so for the vast majority of the global population.
Predictstreet, however, has an outsized significance in Gibraltar, where the company serves as a test case for the territory’s approach to gambling regulation. On 18 March, Gibraltar’s parliament approved legislation presented by Minister for Justice, Trade and Industry Nigel Feetham, revising how gambling licences are issued and enforcement action taken, with the ambition of bringing up to speed an offshore jurisdiction which is perceived as somewhat fusty and old-fashioned in the gaming industry. The minister has the power to issue licences at his discretion.
Within a week, on 26 March, Predictstreet became the first company to be issued a licence under the new legislation, although, as the same Nigel Feetham told parliament, the application had been made before the legislation got parliamentary approval (*). Feetham said that Predictstreet’s approval “represents record timing” for a gambling company getting a licence in Gibraltar.
Feetham’s glee at this success was tempered somewhat when, just days later, he was forced to defend the licence on GBC, the territory’s public service broadcaster. Confronted with Josimar’s findings, Feetham said he had no concerns because, he claimed, the insider trading settlement of the company’s overseer, Ajay Bhatia, was already known to the GFSC. Evidently excited about the financial potential of the company for Gibraltar’s economy, he said the financial backing of Abu Dhabi royal family gave him confidence in Predictstreet.
This, however, doesn’t answer concerns about Psarrakis’ and Piri’s past conduct, both of which were not in the public domain at the time.
It also fails to address the extraordinary speed of the licensing process. Predictstreet remains a company in its infancy, with no working product and only a handful of employees. Yet, it managed to obtain a licence in a matter of weeks, an astonishing sequence of events in an industry where it typically takes many months to issue a licence. On 18 March, Feetham had told parliament that, “I am pleased to report that I expect a licence application will shortly be submitted to the Gambling Commissioner.”
Did Fleetham refer to Predictreet? In January, he attended ICE, a gaming industry conference in Barcelona. Predictstreet’s URL was registered at the end of January. A few weeks later, Feetham went to Consensus Hong Kong 2026, a leading crypto conference. The Gibraltar government’s website has links to all its approved gambling companies’ brands, but simply shows “website under construction” next to Predictstreet.
By contrast, in Malta, it can take between 6 and 12 months to get a gaming licence. In the Isle of Man, a historically gambling friendly jurisdiction, the issuing of licences is faster, but still takes 3 to 4 months. Even in Curacao, home to some of the most opaque and dubious cryptocasinos, it’s a minimum of 12 weeks, often much longer.
Shotgun wedding
Fifa, too, seems to have embraced Predictstreet with indecent haste. Even before the official unveiling of the partnership on 2 April, the company had been the 2026 Fifa Series’ “presenting partner.”
On 25 March, Kazakhstan and Namibia kicked off the set of international friendlies – which Fifa’s inhouse platform streams to a global audience – with Predictstreet’s branding featured prominently on pitchside signage and pre-match centre circle banners. Extraordinarily, then, Fifa’s most recent tournament promoted an unlicensed gambling company, one that may not even have applied for its licence at the time the deal was struck.
Hours later, on the other side of the world, as Puerto Rico defeated Guam 4-0, pitchside hoardings at the Estadio Juan Ramon Loubriel in Bayamon promoted Predictstreet. In Kazakhstan, online sports betting is heavily regulated. In Puerto Rico, a US territory, Predictstreet did not feature in the latest list of approved sports gambling operators.
The brand’s name featured throughout the Fifa Series which concluded at the end of March when Rwanda celebrated victory against Estonia under a Predictstreet-branded winners’ arch brought onto the pitch for medal presentations.
Predictstreet is also the presenting partner for the current Fifa Women’s Series taking place in Brazil, Ivory Coast, Thailand and Kenya. In the Arena Pantanal in Cuiaba, Predictstreet adorned the hoardings during Brazil’s 5-1 trashing of South Korea, but prediction markets require authorisation by local authorities in the South American country. In a matter of weeks, Josimar understands, the Brazilian government could release a rule stating that prediction markets cannot offer sports betting.
Failed launch and failed demo
When Fifa announced the deal, Predictstreet’s website featured a holding page with a countdown clock for a lunchtime launch on 9 April. Last Thursday came and went. The countdown clock and ‘coming soon’ message were removed and, more than twenty-four hours later, a product demo replaced the holding page.
There were no markets on offer. Instead, the demo, riddled with errors, inaccessible on some browsers because of security issues, and with a vague promise of World Cup tickets, failed to function. There was no way to place practice bets or enter the competition. Those who scored best in the demo, the website said, could win one of five World Cup tickets. Predicstreet failed to specify the game dates, seat categories, whether travel and accommodation were included, or even the competition’s closing date.
In social media posts, Predictstreet promoted prediction markets in an innocuous manner: “Prediction markets can sound niche. They’re not. At their core, they are a way for people to turn what they know, see and expect into something actionable.” The language also tends to imply users can have a greater degree of confidence in their bets than they really can: “It’s not just just opinion, it’s insight made actionable.”
And so, Fifa signed a partner with only a partially functioning demo website and with no clear launch date for its product. Even more striking, Zurich allowed Predictstreet to sponsor a Fifa event before the company obtained a licence, one acquired at lightning speed and in a jurisdiction where its head of anti-money laundering had previously served a two-year ban for AML failures.
Fifa and Adi Predictstreet did not respond to questions from Josimar.
(*) The parliamentary bill entered a transitional period on 1 April and had not yet passed into law at the time of writing.
