A new investigative report from independent media outlet Novara Media has uncovered a direct connection between three popular UK-based online competition platforms and an Israeli billionaire with a long history of donating to the Israeli military, as a United Nations inquiry recently confirmed Israel’s commission of genocide in Gaza.
At the center of the revelation is Teddy Sagi, the $7.1 billion billionaire (per Forbes 2024 estimates) who already holds high-profile UK assets including London’s iconic tourist destination Camden Market. Sagi controls a 69.5% majority stake in Winvia Entertainment Group, the British operator behind three of the most visited online prize draw websites in the country: Rev Comps, Best of the Better (BOTB), and Click Competitions.
Novara’s investigation finds that hundreds of thousands of British consumers enter these platforms every month, paying entry fees in the hopes of winning high-value prizes ranging from luxury sports cars and residential properties to high-end watches and the latest consumer electronics. BOTB alone claims a track record of more than 500,000 unique winners and has disbursed over £147 million in total prizes to date, drawing consistent consumer engagement across the UK.
Beyond his ownership of the prize draw group, Sagi holds a sprawling global business empire that includes gambling software giant Playtech, British-Israeli cybersecurity firm Kape Technologies, and a portfolio of major VPN services counting ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, and ZenMate among its holdings.
What has drawn renewed scrutiny in light of the crisis in Gaza, however, is Sagi’s longstanding pattern of financial contributions to the Israeli military. According to Novara’s reporting, as recently as November 2023 – weeks after Israel’s military campaign in Gaza began, when the Palestinian death toll already topped 15,000 – Sagi donated 1 million Israeli shekels (equivalent to roughly $340,000) to fund homebound taxi transport for Israeli soldiers on leave from frontline positions.
That donation is just one in a series of contributions dating back years. Before the 2023 campaign, Sagi gave more than $3 million to an Israeli Ministry of Defense scholarship program for discharged soldiers. During a 2019 industry gala, he also publicly committed to offering employment at his global companies for active Israeli troops. Sagi is no stranger to controversy either: he was named in the 2021 Pandora Papers leak, which linked him to no fewer than 60 companies registered in secretive offshore tax havens. In 1996, he also served five months in an Israeli prison following conviction on fraud and bribery charges.
The revelations come just as a United Nations Commission of Inquiry released a long-awa report confirming that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza through the deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians, particularly children. Commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar confirmed to reporters that since the launch of Israel’s campaign on October 7, 2023, more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed, and an additional 44,000 have been injured. Even after an agreed ceasefire in 2025, Muralidhar noted, children continue to face harm, with Israel disregarding both ceasefire terms and its obligation to protect Palestinian civilians under international law. Overall, the total Palestinian death toll from the campaign has surpassed 73,000, with more than 170,000 people injured, according to the commission’s data.
Novara Media reached out to Winvia Entertainment Group for comment on the connections to Sagi and his donations to the Israeli military, but no response has been made public. This reporting was aggregated and contextualized by independent global outlet Middle East Eye, which specializes in on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.