For the better part of a decade, Betika has been one of the most visible brands in East and Central African sports betting.
Its logo has appeared on football kits, its name has been splashed across sponsorship deals, and its executives have posed for photographs with international celebrities.
But behind that polished public image, a very different picture is now emerging.
A whistleblower dossier, currently being reviewed by investigators in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, lays out a series of allegations that paint the company as operating a sophisticated, multi-layered financial scheme spanning at least nine African countries.
The documents describe a system where bets were allegedly rewritten after events had already been settled, where tax filings were systematically distorted, and where shell companies in Europe and the Middle East were used to funnel money out of the continent.
The most dramatic allegation centres on a single day in November 2024. According to the dossier, Betika’s Tanzanian platform went offline on the 23rd of that month.
In that window of darkness, when the audit trails were temporarily blind, approximately half a million US dollars in bets were manually reclassified.
Losing bets became winning ones, but the proceeds did not go to the punters who had placed them. Instead, they were reportedly routed through a series of M-Pesa accounts held by individuals named as directors.
The technical capability for this kind of retroactive manipulation, the whistleblowers claim, came from a team of developers based in Spain.
This group is said to have built and maintained a back-end function that allowed operators to change bet outcomes after settlement.
The purpose was not to defraud customers but to manipulate the company’s tax obligations.
By converting losing bets into winners on paper, the company could reduce the net amount on which it owed excise and gaming tax to the Tanzanian government.
This incident, as serious as it is, appears to be just one manifestation of a much broader pattern. The dossier alleges that across all the markets where Betika operates, the company built a parallel reporting architecture.
Tax filings submitted to authorities in Kenya, Tanzania, DRC, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique, Zambia, Uganda, and formerly Ethiopia were systematically distorted.
Punter winnings were reportedly understated by about 30 per cent, while losses were overstated by the same margin.
The effect was to shrink the company’s declared gaming revenue and, consequently, its tax liabilities in every jurisdiction.
The mechanism, if the allegations are true, is elegant in its simplicity. Betika uses the SportsRadar Managed Trading Services platform as its core trading and risk management infrastructure.
That system captures every bet transaction in real time, including final settlements and payout amounts.
That raw data represents the ground truth. Against it, the whistleblowers say, Betika generated a separate layer of reports for submission to tax authorities, one that diverged materially from the MTS baseline.
An auditor with access to the platform logs could run the comparison and see the discrepancy without any cooperation from the company itself.
Beyond the manipulation of bet outcomes and tax filings, the dossier describes a network of shell companies incorporated in France and the United Arab Emirates.
These entities are said to have supplied Betika’s African operations with grossly inflated invoices for services, creating paper costs that reduced taxable profit in each country.
The pattern is a familiar one in financial crime typologies, using offshore service companies to erode operating income through intragroup transfers.
In the DRC specifically, the sources allege that this shell invoice mechanism was supplemented by hawala, the informal value transfer system that moves money across borders without leaving a traceable wire trail.
For a company trying to extract value from a market with a large informal economy and limited inter-agency financial intelligence coordination, hawala offers considerable utility.
The whistleblower dossier specifically names Paul Mutegi, Betika’s Group General Counsel and Head of Legal and Tax, as a key figure in these arrangements.
He is described not merely as a passive legal adviser but as an active conduit through whom the shell company invoicing arrangements were managed and associated fund movements were facilitated.
A detailed right of reply was sent to his law firm address, outlining each allegation in numbered form.
No response was received.
The Ethiopia case provides a troubling precedent for Betika.
In November 2025, Ethiopian authorities suspended the licences of 22 sports betting firms, including Betika, following a multi-agency investigation.
Authorities alleged that the suspended firms had collectively concealed more than 100 billion Ethiopian birr in revenue that should have been remitted as government income.
Twenty-four individuals were arrested. On 15 December 2025, the Ethiopian Lottery Service revoked all sports betting licences nationwide, blocking transactions through banks and payment providers.
Betika’s Ethiopian website posted a holding notice that read: “Dear customers, we would like to inform you that your favourite betting partner, Betika, has been suspended for an indefinite period. We will soon be back with improved odds, faster service and a more efficient operation.”
The company made no further public comment on the underlying allegations. It has not made any public comment on the Tanzania or DRC allegations either.
The significance of the Ethiopia case lies in its consistency. The central allegation there was underreporting of revenue to reduce tax obligations. That is precisely the allegation in the Tanzania dossier, expressed in terms of a specific percentage distortion and a named data source capable of exposing it.
A company that allegedly underreported revenue in Ethiopia by hundreds of millions of dollars was simultaneously, according to the whistleblowers, running a systematic misreporting of winnings and losses across every African market it operated in.
Betika’s encounters with African tax authorities did not begin with Ethiopia.
In Kenya, the company has a documented history of contested tax obligations stretching back to 2018. In June 2019, the Kenya Revenue Authority demanded Ksh 1.7 billion from Betika, claiming unpaid withholding tax arrears on winnings for the 2018 and 2019 tax years.
Betika, alongside SportPesa and Betin, disputed the demand, arguing that the KRA had misinterpreted the definition of winnings to include the full stake rather than the net gain.
The Tax Appeals Tribunal ruled in the betting firms’ favour in November 2019.
The KRA appealed.
A High Court in 2022 produced a mixed ruling, finding in a Sportpesa case that the authority could collect betting tax via agency notices but upholding on a definitional question that winnings did not include the full stake.
The net result was years of legal manoeuvring during which the government’s ability to collect what it believed was owed was repeatedly delayed.Betika characterised its conduct throughout as fully compliant.
But the Tanzania whistleblowers now allege that compliance, at least in the African markets, was a performance conducted for regulators while a different set of numbers operated behind the curtain, stored in the MTS logs that no regulator had thought to subpoena.
Investigators in Tanzania and the DRC are understood to have received the full whistleblower dossier.
The forensic pathway is straightforward to describe.
Step one is obtaining the raw SportsRadar MTS transaction logs for Betika’s operations in both jurisdictions, which requires either a regulatory subpoena to Sportradar or access to Betika’s own back-end system records.
Step two is cross-referencing those logs against the tax filings submitted to the Tanzania Revenue Authority and the DRC’s tax authority.
If the 30 per cent divergence alleged is real, it will appear in the data as a systematic pattern across thousands of bet tickets over multiple years.
The beneficial ownership trails on the French and Dubai shell entities are a second priority.
Company registers in France and the UAE are accessible through international legal assistance frameworks, and the invoicing relationships, combined with payment records from Betika’s banking counterparties, would establish whether the described transactions occurred.
The M-Pesa account records linked to the named director accounts represent a third evidentiary thread, one that falls squarely within Kenya’s Asset Recovery Agency mandate if the funds are determined to be proceeds of crime.
Communication records between the Spain-based technical team and Betika’s management are likely to be sought as part of establishing whether the retroactive bet manipulation capability was built intentionally and deployed knowingly.
Enterprise messaging and email archives from inside the period spanning the 23 November 2024 incident would be particularly relevant.
Betika built its public image on sport, on community initiatives, on grassroots football and youth pitches.
It is a brand constructed to feel local, invested, and accountable. Behind that brand, the allegations now circulating in three separate jurisdictions describe something very different.
A Spain-based technical team with the capability to rewrite betting outcomes after the fact.
A systematic 30 per cent distortion of the tax filings submitted to every African government under which the company operates.
A network of shells in France and Dubai supplying paper costs to erode taxable profit.
A legal counsel who allegedly served as the conduit for the entire arrangement. And a company that, when presented with these precise claims in writing, chose not to respond.
The questions are now on the record. How was a system capable of retroactive bet alteration built, and who authorised its use?
Who ordered the manual interventions on 23 November 2024?
What is the relationship between the parent entity and the French and Dubai entities identified by the whistleblowers?
What role, specifically, has Paul Mutegi played in structuring those relationships?
And why, when presented with a detailed right of reply, did Betika elect silence over denial?
The investigations in Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa are ongoing.
The Kenyan regulators and the Kenya Revenue Authority have not yet indicated whether they intend to act. Ethiopia has already acted.
The forensic path is clear. Whether those with the authority to walk it will do so is now the central remaining question.
The answers, when they come, will determine whether this remains a set of serious but unproven allegations or the beginning of a reckoning for one of the region’s most dominant and, until now, most insulated gaming operations.
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