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Chile’s online betting platforms operate without a single local licence, yet their footprint is now large enough that named executives, university credentials and reporting lines back to Cyprus, Estonia and Greece have become a legitimate story in their own right, according to reporting by Diario Financiero.
The debate around these platforms has intensified on several fronts at once: constant advertising exposure during the World Cup, a Servicio de Impuestos Internos (SII) resolution seeking to apply VAT to their operations, and a string of Supreme Court rulings that have found the platforms illegal under Chilean law. The Contraloría, Chile’s comptroller general, sidestepped the dispute entirely last Friday, declining to rule on the legality of the SII resolution after being asked to do so by lawmakers and the Asociación Chilena de Casinos de Juego, the trade body representing licensed land-based casinos.
No official figures exist, but industry executives speaking at the CGS Santiago event put the local online gambling market’s gross gaming revenue at roughly US$650m a year. H2 Gambling Capital, the international consultancy, forecasts that figure could nearly double to around US$1.2bn by 2028, which would make Chile the fourth-largest gambling market in Latin America.
Three platforms account for an estimated 60 per cent of that market, per H2 Gambling Capital: Betano, Coolbet and JugaBet. None holds a Chilean operating licence, but all three maintain functioning local teams of 25 to 40 staff, working in-person or remotely, led by a mix of Chilean and foreign executives with credentials spanning local universities, Harvard business certifications and, notably, prior careers managing physical casinos.
JugaBet’s Chile operation has been led since 2023 by Vadym Sotskov, a Ukrainian country head reporting to the platform’s Cyprus-based leadership, who according to his own professional profile was responsible for launching the product locally. Coolbet’s Latin America marketing operation is run by Jorge Cárdenas, a University of Chile-trained journalist with over a decade at Chilean outlets including Las Últimas Noticias, who joined the company in 2019 and now oversees a 25-to-30 person team and Chile-Peru marketing budgets, reporting to Coolbet’s board in Tallinn.
Betano’s most senior Chile-based executive, reporting to headquarters in Greece, is Fabián Mellado, a Universidad Andrés Bello engineer with a Harvard Business Skills certificate. Before moving into online betting, Mellado spent 2018-2022 as commercial manager at Enjoy’s land-based casinos in Los Andes and Viña del Mar, following an earlier stint managing client relations at Enjoy’s now-former Punta del Este property. That land-based-to-online career path isn’t unique to Betano: Novibet’s Chile operation is led by José Tomás Jaramillo, a commercial engineer who also previously served as assistant commercial manager at Enjoy. The staffing pattern is a useful data point in its own right: platforms with no legal pathway to operate in Chile are nonetheless investing in permanent local teams, senior hires with elite credentials, and – repeatedly – talent poached directly from Enjoy, one of the region’s established licensed casino operators. That flow of expertise from regulated land-based gaming into unregulated online betting is likely to become a recurring theme as Chile’s Congress and courts continue to work through what a formal licensing framework for online betting might eventually look like.
