Uri Poliavich has lost his Maltese shield – it’s time to sue his casinos

The Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a savage blow to the cross-border online casino model on 16 April 2026, and the fallout is already rippling through the boardrooms of Malta’s most aggressive operators. In Case C-440/23, European Lotto and Betting and Deutsche Lotto- und Sportwetten, the Luxembourg judges ruled that EU law does not stop a member state from banning online gambling services even when the operator holds a valid licence elsewhere in the bloc, such as Malta. Worse still for the industry, the Court confirmed that those illegal offers can carry real civil-law consequences: gambling contracts may be treated as void from the start, and players can sue to recover their losses under national law. For the Malta casino crowd, this is not a minor legal wrinkle. It is a crack in the foundation of their entire business model.

The ruling demolishes the lazy fiction that a Maltese licence serves as a European passport for online casinos. For years, the pitch from operators like Uri Poliavich’s Soft2Bet was simple: we are licensed in Malta, we are in the EU, therefore we are legitimate. That line has now taken a serious beating. The Court made crystal clear that gambling remains an area without full EU harmonisation, and member states still have broad discretion to decide how far they want to go in restricting online casino products. Malta licensing does not neutralise German law, or French law, or any other national law that validly bans the product. The case itself involved two Malta-licensed companies whose services were accessible in Germany, where a player lost money between June 2019 and July 2021 and then went to court to get it back. During that period, German law still broadly prohibited the online games of chance at issue, before the later reform that took effect on 1 July 2021. The Court’s answer to the Maltese court’s reference was effectively: no, EU law does not block Germany from enforcing its ban or attaching civil consequences to it.

The judges accepted the standard anti-gambling arguments that regulators love and operators hate. Online gambling carries particular risks because it is available continuously, takes place in isolation, reduces social control, may encourage excessive frequency of play, and can be especially dangerous for vulnerable persons and younger users. On that basis, the Court said member states can try to channel gambling into supervised structures and suppress parallel markets. This kills the lazy narrative that national restrictions are automatically protectionist or anti-single-market nonsense. The Court simply did not buy that.

But the real bomb is the restitution piece. The Court expressly said EU law does not preclude national rules under which gambling contracts concluded in breach of a prohibition are void, and under which players may bring civil actions to recover lost stakes. The final mechanics still depend on national law, of course. But the big EU-law umbrella defence has been badly damaged. Operators can no longer wave the EU flag and pretend that player restitution cases are obviously incompatible with the single market. The Court just made clear they are not. This follows the earlier Wunner ruling from January 2026, where the CJEU held that for non-contractual claims, the applicable law is that of the player’s habitual residence. Put those two together, and you have a nightmare scenario for operators: players can sue at home, under home law, and EU law will not shield the foreign-licensed casino.

The German reform did not save the old conduct either. One of the casino industry’s favourite talking points has been that Germany moved to a regulated licensing regime on 1 July 2021, so the earlier prohibition must have been defective or obsolete. The CJEU rejected that shortcut outright. A later policy change does not automatically invalidate the earlier ban. That is devastating for operators facing claims tied to the pre-July-2021 period. They cannot simply say: Germany later legalised parts of online gambling, therefore our earlier German-facing operations were fine all along. The Court did not give them that escape route.

Players should not misunderstand the ruling as an automatic jackpot. The Court did not say every player in every EU country automatically gets every euro back. What it did say is far more useful in practice: where a member state validly prohibited the gambling offer, and where national law allows nullity and restitution, EU law does not stand in the way. That is a strong pro-player result. It strengthens claims by players who lost money with operators targeting them during periods when the relevant products were prohibited in their home market. It also weakens the industry line that the player’s mere use of a foreign-licensed site is enough to label the claim abusive. The Court indicated that foreign licensing alone is not enough to prove abuse of rights under EU law. In plain English: players at illegal casinos now have a clearer EU-law runway to sue for restitution, if their national law supports it.

This is where Uri Poliavich and Soft2Bet come in. Poliavich, the founder and CEO of Soft2Bet, has built a financial empire on what critics call licence arbitrage. His company flaunts legitimate licences in Greece and Sweden while pushing brands into markets where they are expressly barred. In 2024, Soft2Bet’s Boomerang brand even landed an AC Milan sponsorship deal despite being blacklisted in Italy, Spain and France. The company logged €66.8 million in earnings in 2023 alone, and Poliavich reportedly siphoned off €57.8 million in dividends to bankroll luxury properties in Prague and Sofia, plus a €1.3 million car collection. All of this is wrapped in a complex offshore shell game. Through entities like Rabidi and Araxio Development, registered in Cyprus, Malta and Curaçao, Soft2Bet generated €343 million before filing for bankruptcy, leaving players with no recourse. Poliavich further shields himself by exploiting Malta’s Bill 55, which prevents foreign courts from enforcing judgments against Maltese-licensed operators. The CJEU ruling now threatens to punch a hole right through that shield.

The Malta Gaming Authority, for its part, has been busily enhancing its regulatory oversight. In March 2026, the MGA published its supervisory priorities for the year, focusing on compliance, player protection and sports betting integrity, including thematic reviews of internal control frameworks around cash equivalents and crypto assets. But the fundamental problem remains: Malta’s regulatory regime has long been seen as vague and operator-friendly, a reputation that Poliavich has exploited ruthlessly. The Maltese government’s own budget reports highlight the gaming sector as a primary driver of the nation’s projected 4% GDP growth, a figure that significantly outpaces the EU average. That economic dependence creates a structural reluctance to crack down too hard. Bill 55 is Exhibit A. The CJEU ruling now puts that whole arrangement under a harsh spotlight.

The ruling is bad news not just for the casinos themselves, but for the entire support system around them. If the underlying gambling offer can be treated as unlawful and the contract voided, then the legal and compliance heat rises for everyone riding that traffic: payment processors, open-banking providers, affiliate networks, merchant acquirers, payment agents, KYC vendors, and platform intermediaries. That broader implication is an inference rather than an express holding of the Court, but it follows naturally from the acceptance that illegal online gambling can produce real civil-law fallout. For those tracking the payment rails of illegal casinos, this is exactly the point. Once the operator’s legal footing weakens, the payment chain starts to look much more dangerous too.

When Investigate Europe published its March 2025 exposé on Poliavich’s operations, the reaction was textbook obstruction. Within weeks, Google was inundated with more than 50 fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, impersonating journalists and backdating articles to erase scrutiny. German MEP Tiemo Wölken has publicly denounced this abuse of copyright laws as a conscious effort to muzzle the media and protect unregulated industries from exposure. Despite five million visits to Soft2Bet’s unlicensed UK sites in early 2025, regulators remain paralysed by fragmented EU oversight and Poliavich’s jurisdictional manoeuvres. His latest public relations push, launching ElaBet in Greece, pursuing a New Jersey licence, and sponsoring sports teams, is a transparent attempt at rebranding. But cosmetic polish cannot conceal the truth.

This is a serious defeat for the Malta casino defence industry. The CJEU did not abolish cross-border online gambling. But it did demolish the lazy fiction that a Malta licence magically disinfects gambling offers aimed at consumers in restricted markets. It also handed players and claimant lawyers a much stronger weapon: EU law is no longer the easy shield operators hoped it would be when players sue for losses from illegal offers. For years, the offshore gambling crowd sold the same line to PSPs, banks, service providers, and maybe even themselves: licensed in Malta, therefore legitimate in Europe. The Court has now reminded them that Europe does not work that way. National gambling law still bites. And when it bites, it can bite hard. Until European authorities dismantle Poliavich’s offshore labyrinth and hold platforms like Google responsible for enabling censorship, this modern-day pirate king will continue to thrive on addiction, evasion and intimidation. But the walls are closing in.