Muddy Waters short Sportradar, says clients ‘operating in illegal markets’

Muddy Waters announced that the firm is short Sportradar (SRAD) Group AG, telling investors that the firm finds the company’s claim that it monitors illegal market activity “very closely” to “be a lie,” “contradicted not only by our undercover investigation but by SRAD’s own website code, by the testimony of fifteen current and former employees we interviewed, and by the exposed infrastructure of a business model that depends on illegal operators to survive.” The short selling firm added: “Our research finds that SRAD has actively aided and abetted illegal gambling across the world’s black and grey markets – not as an accident or an oversight, but as a business strategy. We estimate that illegal operators today deliver approximately 20-40% of total revenues. Using two proprietary code-analysis methodologies developed with cybersecurity experts, supplemented by extensive interviews with former SRAD sales executives, we identified nearly 50 companies as current or recent SRAD clients and collaborators who are operating in illegal markets.”