Image credit: Source: Curaçao Gaming Authority and Government of Curaçao public statements. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
The Curaçao Gaming Authority, built to end the island's decades-old reputation for rubber-stamping online casinos and crypto sportsbooks, is now the subject of an independent investigation into millions of euros it paid the consultancy that helped design its own reform. Finance minister Charles Cooper opened the inquiry in late July 2026, questioning why Random Consulting Limited, a Malta-based firm run by former Malta Gaming Authority chief executive Mario Galea, has been paid to build and run the licensing system since 2022.
Cooper's ministry put the payment at 8.3 million Caribbean guilders a year, about 4.1 million euros. Random Consulting disputes that framing, saying it has received roughly 3.4 million euros in total since 2022, not annually, for designing and maintaining the online portal that now underpins every direct licence the regulator issues.
Four private gatekeepers, one thin layer of oversight
Until 2023, Curaçao ran online gambling through four private master licence holders: Antillephone, Curaçao eGaming, Gaming Curaçao and Cyber Rock Entertainment. Each could sell sub-licences to operators at its own discretion, and a single sub-licence could cover up to 40 domains, letting a handful of companies vouch for thousands of gambling websites with almost no ongoing supervision from the government itself.
The National Ordinance on Games of Chance, known in the industry as the LOK, replaced that structure with direct licensing from one public regulator. The old master licences expired in stages through January 2025, and the Curaçao Gaming Authority took over as the sole issuer of licences, building the kind of institutional credibility that banks, payment processors and Tier 1 operators had spent years saying the old system lacked.
The board resigns as the reform lands
The reform's first real test came from inside the regulator itself. In mid-September 2025, all three of the Curaçao Gaming Authority's supervisory board commissioners, Robert Reijnaert, Shelwyn Salesia and Ildefons Simon, resigned at once, weeks after oversight of the regulator moved from the finance ministry to Minister of Justice Shalten Hato on 19 August. The regulator called it "an administrative process following government transition" and said "all licensing and supervisory activities are expected to continue uninterrupted." A public relations adviser for the authority, Aideen Shortt, said there was "no delay or deviation in the rollout of the LOK."
A month later, the minister most associated with the reform was gone too. Javier Silvania resigned as finance minister on 15 October 2025, after a leaked recording surfaced in which he and the head of the tax department accused each other of corruption. Silvania returned to parliament for the ruling MFK party days afterward.
The consultancy at the centre of it
Random Consulting is not a bystander in any of this. Since 2022, Galea's firm has advised the body formerly known as the Gaming Control Board on the shift to direct licensing and built the online portal operators now use to apply, pay fees and manage their licences, the same infrastructure the Netherlands has spent 2026 pressuring payment providers and banks to treat as a genuine compliance signal, not a rubber stamp.
That dual role, adviser to the reform and vendor to the regulator it helped create, is what the authority's own supervisory board is now trying to untangle. It has shortlisted ten international firms to run an independent investigation into who signed the Random Consulting agreement, under what authority, and whether the amount paid matches the work delivered. Neither the ministry's 4.1 million euro figure nor Random Consulting's 3.4 million euro total has been independently confirmed.
A cleaner licence, a familiar risk
None of this has stopped the substantive rollout. In June 2026 the regulator issued phased cryptocurrency rules for consumer-facing licensees, requiring segregated player, operational and treasury wallets, a ban on funds linked to mixers or sanctioned addresses, and blockchain analytics for transaction monitoring, with full compliance due by mid-2027. Operators that once treated Curaçao as the cheapest way to accept crypto now face scrutiny closer to what UK and Dutch regulators apply to fiat payments, a shift that matters well beyond the handful of streaming-led crypto casinos that built entire marketing operations on the old regime's permissiveness.
That is the paradox operators, banks and payment processors now have to price in. The licence itself is harder to get, better documented and backed by real ongoing supervision on paper. But the institution issuing it has lost a supervisory board, a finance minister and, for now, the benefit of the doubt, all inside the first eighteen months of the reform it was meant to prove worked. A direct licence from the Curaçao Gaming Authority carries more weight than an old sub-licence ever did, and that added weight is exactly why the investigation matters. Firms that leaned on the reform's improved reputation to justify staying in Curaçao rather than chasing licences in markets that enforce illegal operators out by disrupting their payment rails are now watching the regulator investigate the people who wrote its own rulebook. For a jurisdiction competing against licensed markets that never had a master licence era to explain away, credibility was supposed to be the entire point of starting over.
The paperwork changed hands, the habits didn't
Curaçao proved it could replace a broken licensing structure with a functioning one. It has not yet proven it can separate the people who write gambling regulation from the people who get paid to write it, and until the independent investigation reports back, that is the harder licence for the Curaçao Gaming Authority to earn.