Kenyans gambling
The GRA now holds a court-confirmed money laundering finding against an operator it is expected to renew. Its decision will speak louder than any press release about the new regulatory era.
As June 30 2026 nears, eyes are on Gambling Regulatory Authority (GRA) if it will renew licences of firms facing integrity test on matters relating to money laundering and data trafficking just to mention. The Director General cum CEO GRA is Peter Maina Karimi appointed Febuary 2026.gra
Kenya’s gambling sector is in panic as June 30 deadline approaches. GRA officially assumed full oversight of Kenya’s gambling industry from then Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB) on February 28, 2026. GRA is incharge of issuing and renewing operator licenses under the new Gambling Control Act, 2025.
It is the GRA’s first major licensing test. And the question that accountability advocates, legal scholars, and ordinary Kenyans are asking is blunt: will this new regulator rubber-stamp the status quo, or will it treat court findings of money laundering, data trafficking, and the criminal arrest of a betting firm’s co-owner as disqualifying events?
Three operators in particular are in the spotlight MozzartBet, OdiBet, and Betika — each carrying fresh court findings and criminal proceedings that, in any serious regulatory environment, would give a licensing body serious pause.
The case against MozzartBet is perhaps the clearest on the public record. In a landmark decision, the Court of Appeal upheld a High Court ruling finding that MozzartBet Kenya Limited was involved in a sophisticated money-laundering scheme, resulting in the forfeiture of over Ksh300 million to the state.
The ruling was delivered by Appellate Judges Francis Toiyott, Fred Ochieng, and Aggrey Muchelule.
The appellate judges found that MozzartBet failed to explain its financial dealings with Kimaco Connections Ltd — a company that lacked the capacity to deliver the software it allegedly supplied.
The court noted that Kimaco’s payments to MozzartBet directors, including invoices worth thousands of dollars to shareholder Branimir Melentijevic for supposed software services, lacked credible documentation.
The High Court had previously ruled that Kimaco operated as a shell company, incorporated with the primary purpose of laundering funds.
The Assets Recovery Agency demonstrated through M-Pesa and bank transaction data that MozzartBet’s payments moved through multiple layers of transfers, ultimately depositing into its own directors’ personal accounts.
The Court of Appeal invoked a vivid metaphor in its ruling: “If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck,” using it to underscore the suspicious nature of the transactions and to confirm that the evidence met the statutory threshold for money laundering, denying the company protection as an innocent third party.
The GRA now holds a court-confirmed money laundering finding against an operator it is expected to renew. Its decision will speak louder than any press release about the new regulatory era.
If MozzartBet’s case is about financial crime, the OdiBet story is about something equally serious — and now, something criminal. The firm and its co-owner, Andrew Akwesera Aligula, have moved from judicial scrutiny to police custody in the span of weeks.
A DCI forensic report has named OdiBets as a buyer of the entire Safaricom subscriber database in what investigators describe as an eleven-month criminal conspiracy. The company allegedly acquired stolen data covering 29.9 million Kenyans in multiple separate transactions.
Court filings reveal that the data was not transferred in a single batch but was instead sold in segments — datasets of 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 records — tailored to meet the needs of specific buyers. Investigators say the transactions followed a clear commercial pattern, with sample data first shared with potential buyers before full purchase.
Critically, OdiBets entered the market in 2018 — the exact period when the data theft and distribution was underway — raising serious questions about whether its early growth was fuelled by illegally obtained customer intelligence.
The judicial dimension crystallised on May 13, 2026. A Kenyan High Court ruling ordered Safaricom to pay KES 9.9 million for a massive data breach after Justice Bahati Mwamuye of the Constitutional and Human Rights Division found that the telco violated the rights of 11 subscribers whose personal and financial data — including betting histories, M-Pesa transaction records, and geolocation information — was extracted by employees and sold to betting companies including OdiBets between 2018 and 2019.
The judgment records the named entities and individuals as Andrew Aligula, OdiBet, the Mburus, Charles, and the Mule. The court found these references to be neither incidental nor innocuous, describing them as evidence of a coordinated and organised pattern of external transmission and commercial exploitation of confidential subscriber information originating from within Safaricom’s own systems.
The judgment quoted at Paragraph 68: “The communications reveal what, prima facie, appears to be a deliberate enterprise involving the extraction, transfer, dissemination, and monetisation of subscriber data to various actors operating within the betting and gambling ecosystem.”
Then, in a development that took Kenya’s betting industry completely off guard, came the arrest. In a dramatic fall from grace that sent shockwaves through Kenya’s multi-billion-shilling betting industry, Andrew Aligula — the co-owner of OdiBets and a man who openly bragged for years that he was untouchable — was arrested and spent nights in a cell at Gigiri Police Station.
Even as panic gripped the industry, efforts by Aligula to pull strings at the very top reportedly collapsed: his desperate calls to President William Ruto went unanswered, and his powerful political ally Oscar Sudi was left stunned when the Head of State declined to intervene.Aligula boasts to be close to Jimmy Kibaki,son of late president Mwai Kibaki.
On the very day of his arrest, chaos erupted as the OdiBets app went completely down for over five hours, leaving thousands of punters locked out and sparking wild speculation across betting forums that the empire was already imploding from within.
For years, Aligula had deliberately maintained invisibility, content to let public attention focus on more recognisable associates like Jimmy Kibaki, son of the late former President Mwai Kibaki.
Yet a careful examination of corporate filings, regulatory exemptions, and political favours reveals Aligula as the true architect behind OdiBets’ remarkable ascent. The arrest has now stripped that cover away entirely.
Betika’s legal exposure runs parallel to OdiBet’s. The same High Court judgment confirmed that subscriber and betting-related data was repeatedly disseminated to multiple third parties for commercial purposes between June 2018 and May 2019, with communications referencing “Betika” as one of the named recipients alongside OdiBet and individuals identified only as “Charles” and “the Mule.”
The firm’s data governance record outside the criminal sphere is equally concerning. Kenya’s Data Protection Commissioner fined Betika Ksh250,000 after the company demanded excessive financial data — including three months of M-Pesa statements — from a customer who sought only to close his betting account, a practice the ODPC ruled violated the Data
Protection Act of 2019. Whether Betika was an aware participant or a commercial opportunist who absorbed stolen subscriber ntelligence to sharpen its targeting, the fact that its name appears in court-corroborated communications as a data recipient is a regulatory red flag the GRA cannot legitimately ignore.
The court found these references to be neither incidental nor innocuous, describing them as evidence of a coordinated and organised pattern of external transmission and commercial exploitation of confidential subscriber information originating from within Safaricom’s own systems.
The GRA was established precisely to fix what the BCLB could not. The new framework requires all operators to bring their operations into full compliance with updated requirements by the end of the current licensing cycle in June 2026, and the GRA has explicitly positioned the new era around transparency and accountability.
Companies on the approved list must now meet new compliance standards to retain their licenses, making regulatory adherence a non-negotiable part of ongoing operations. But words mean little without enforcement. Kenya has seen this script before.
In July 2025, the BCLB approved 99 firms for the 2025-26 financial year — including Betika and OdiBets —signing off on the list weeks after the June 30 deadline had already passed, with no apparent scrutiny of the court proceedings then underway against several of those same operators.
That cycle-end extension, granted without consequence, illustrated the historic gap between regulatory rhetoric and regulatory action. The GRA must now decide whether the Gambling Control Act, 2025 means what it says. The Act arms the authority with expanded enforcement tools, including the power to inspect digital platforms and independently scrutinise financial flows — precisely the machinery needed to act on evidence already in the public domain.
There is a credible and urgent public interest argument for the GRA to either suspend these licenses pending compliance reviews or, at minimum, attach binding conditions before renewal is granted — compulsory anti-money laundering audits, mandatory data governance certifications, full beneficial ownership disclosure, and independent forensic reviews of customer acquisition practices.
The arrest of Andrew Aligula changes the calculus further. A co-owner of a licensed betting firm sitting in police custody over allegations directly tied to the same data scandal that a High Court has now judicially validated is not a minor compliance footnote.
It is a structural integrity question for the entire sector. Kenyan consumers — 29.9 million of whose data may have been stolen and sold to fund the very marketing campaigns that recruited them into betting — are owed more than a licensing formality.
They are owed a regulator that reads court judgments, tracks criminal proceedings, and understands that a license is not a right but a privilege conditional on the holder’s integrity.
Remember, GRA wants to take over control of billions in revenues generated by the country’s betting industry from the Kenya Revenue Authority(KRA). According to Karimi they are exploring a framework that would allow GRA to retain or directly manage some of the revenue collected from betting and lottery operators instead of the funds being fully handled by KRA.
GRA is now a fully-fledged state corporation with expanded regulatory powers and a more complex operational mandate. The movet to a state corporation comes at a critical moment for the sector, which has witnessed explosive growth over the last decade driven by mobile betting platforms, aggressive marketing and a young digital population.
KRA data for the period to August 2025 shows a 117.2per cent growth in collection in Excise duty on betting services during the financial year 2024-2025, surpassing the set target of Sh11.288 billion. Excise duty from betting services grew to Sh13.233 billion in the 2024-2025 financial year from Sh10.598 billion collected in the last financial year.
During the period under review, Betting Tax surpassed the set target after collecting Sh5.70 billion against a target of Sh5.495 billion. This translates to a performance rate of 103.7per cent and a growth of 22.0per cent. Through the new gambling regulator, the state intends to introduce a more robust licensing and monitoring regime ahead of a major licensing window expected to close in June 2026.
The process will require new technological systems capable of tracking both physical gambling establishments and digital betting platforms operating in Kenya. To meet this target, the authority plans to recruit nearly 200 employees and invest heavily in surveillance systems that can monitor betting transactions and ensure compliance with financial reporting rules.
The global benchmarks show national lottery systems can generate up to two per cent of a country’s Gross Domestic Product when fully developed and properly managed. If implemented successfully, Kenya’s national lottery could channel funding into sports development, enterprise financing and other public interest initiatives.
Other firms in betting industry are Sportspesa, BC Game, Megapari, Lucky Star, Betwinner, 1xbet, Dafabet, Melbet, 22bet, Access Bet among many. June 30 will see if GRA will flex its muscle and control the roques in the industry.
KRA data for the period to August 2025 shows a 117.2per cent growth in collection in Excise duty on betting services during the financial year 2024-2025, surpassing the set target of Sh11.288 billion
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