On September 22, cybersecurity expert Lilith Wittmann published an article detailing the structure of companies surrounding the SOFTSWISS brand as part of the Casino Secrets investigation conducted by international media outlets NDR, NRK, SVT, and Follow the Money.
According to the authors, formally independent companies in Curacao, Malta, and Costa Rica, under whose licenses hundreds of casinos operate, are linked to the group of SOFTSWISS founder Ivan Montik. Here are some key findings highlighted by iGN:
The legal part of the SOFTSWISS group earns revenue by providing platform and payment solutions, as well as its own games, while the illegal part manages the casinos through separate companies in Curacao, Malta, and Costa Rica.
The turnover of nine licensed companies in Curacao for 2025 amounted to approximately €2 billion, of which €1.75 billion was attributed to player losses, which the authors suggest is comparable to losses in all legal online casinos in Germany.
Applications from such companies for Curacao licenses are marked as SOFTSWISS sponsored in compliance documents by CGA regulators, as applicants lack their own funds to launch, and it was separately noted that the operator Dama N.V. presumably receives most of the profits for SOFTSWISS.
Licensed companies receive platform and gaming solutions not directly from the group but through Astol Limited (Isle of Man), which is part of the Maltese Stable Software Solutions, owned by Montik and his partners through Cypriot holdings. The fee for providing the platform is 5% of revenue, while for games, it is 12%.
Payments from licensed companies to white label partners under the Operators Profit category for 2025 amounted to €365 million (17.7% of revenue), while the total losses of the companies reached €181 million.
Montik himself lives in Berlin but does not formally own any gambling segment companies after selling the largest operator in the Dama N.V. network in 2021 and the Maltese group of companies N1 at the end of 2023. Notably, the SOFTSWISS brand is not registered in the German commercial register.
The operator Dama N.V. (turnover of €1.235 billion for 2025) was sold on the day the German gambling law GlüStV came into force to Georgian citizen Nana Gugeshashvili, who, according to CGA documents, has neither assets nor experience in the industry.
All gambling companies in the network are registered to five individuals, four of whom live in Tbilisi, have no traceable connections to the industry, and are untraceable at the addresses provided to the regulator. Nana Gugeshashvili is associated with 700 iGaming sites (turnover of €1.517 billion), Sopio Khurcidze with 352 sites (€348 million), Tengiz Koranashvili with 145 sites (€213 million), and Meri Kandelaqi with 37 sites (€84 million).
An employee of the Polish office of SOFTSWISS is listed as the financial director in at least nine companies in the network, yet in her resume for CGA, she did not mention her ongoing work at SOFTSWISS. Moreover, the AML officer of the three largest licensed companies openly states that he has been working for SOFTSWISS since 2019 under a contract through the Austrian Merkeleon GmbH.
Neither Montik, SOFTSWISS, nor the allegedly nominal owners of the companies responded to inquiries, and Montik's lawyers attempted to prevent the publication.
Earlier in this investigation, a report on the owners of 646 licensed operators in Curacao, including Stake and 1xBet, was released.
The iGN editorial team cannot confirm or deny the accuracy of this information.