Daily Stormer The Most Censored Publication in History
Daily Mail
April 20, 2014
As a billionaire playboy, Teddy Sagi revels in his reputation as one of Britain’s most eligible and wealthy bachelors. He can certainly boast of having had romances with some of the most beautiful women in the world.
But what the businessman — who has a sprawling home in Knightsbridge — should perhaps be less proud of is that he made much of his vast fortune by exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country.
Today, a Mail investigation can reveal that he is the king of the fixed-odds betting terminals that have brought such misery to so many — the so-called crack cocaine of the gambling world. Sagi’s company, Playtech, is behind the majority of software used by High Street bookmakers where people, often from the most deprived areas, pump billions of pounds a year into the machines.
Ladbrokes alone took £1 billion on the terminals in just one month as punters addicted to the ‘games’ — which typically simulate roulette — wagered up to £100 every 20 seconds on a single spin.
As the Mail revealed yesterday, a new poll shows nearly half of all voters believe the terminals should be banned, while 73 per cent want the maximum bet of £100 dramatically reduced.
This pernicious presence in hundreds of High Streets is a direct result of Labour relaxing gambling regulations in 2001, which opened the floodgates for digital roulette games to be played in betting shops.
Since then the number of fixed-odds machines has rocketed to 33,000 — with Playtech providing the technology for more than 20,000 of them.
They have been blamed for an increase in problem gambling, and are said to have an almost hypnotic effect that leaves players like ‘zombies’.
Roger Radler, from Marlow, Buckinghamshire, blames his addiction to these machines for him losing his six-figure salary job as a business development manager in London, as well as the collapse of his marriage.
He ended up amassing £60,000 of debts, which he kept secret from his wife. At one point he was sleeping on a park bench.
‘You can try for a new “high” every 20 seconds, but then you find you are losing huge sums of money,’ he says. ‘At its worst, I probably lost a month’s salary in a couple of hours. It was horrendous.’
This, then, can be the human cost of the betting machines — yet still Teddy Sagi’s company Playtech unashamedly states its software can help bookmakers ‘manage your players throughout the player’s life-cycle’, describing how a gambler can play on a machine in a betting shop, and then ‘when he is ready to move on, he can continue the game on his smartphone and tablet device in the comfort of his own home’.
While it is bad enough that Sagi has helped turn Britain into a nation of gamblers, even more disturbing is the fact that he learned some of the tricks of his controversial trade from the world of internet pornography.
Not only that, I have established he is a convicted criminal who comes from a family with a murderous past.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1972, Sagi became accustomed to the finer things in life. His father ran a travel agency and his parents appeared in newspaper gossip columns. But he and his family were to find far greater notoriety for their criminal activities.
In 1983, Sagi’s older stepbrother, Ronen, was convicted of the murder of an investment consultant. There was little doubt about his guilt — he stole his father’s gun, fitted a silencer and fired ten bullets at his victim after a disagreement believed to be about money.
Then in 1994, when Teddy Sagi was just 22, he was arrested along with seven other businessmen on suspicion of insider trading. They were charged with buying and then manipulating the value of stock in a widespread banking fraud.
Sagi, one of the youngest among those arrested, admitted grave deceit, bribery and insider trading. He was jailed for nine months.
When he was released, he became hellbent on making his fortune. He teamed up with his father trading on the stock market and buying and selling property. But he realised the internet was the means to make large sums, regardless of the morality of how the money is made.
As he said in one of his few public statements, ‘sex and betting are the most profitable businesses on the internet’.
Sagi invested in companies building pornographic websites. He was also eager to seek out those at the forefront of developing software.
In 1999, he invested in a company called Unlimited9, which was involved in setting up pornographic sites. That same year, he launched Playtech in a bid to become the biggest online gambling software developer. He sought out the brightest mathematicians and specialists who could develop games that would maximise profits.
Just seven years later, the company was valued at £550 million when it floated on the London Stock Exchange. Still in his early 30s, Sagi had joined the ranks of the world’s super-rich.
