Exclusive: Betclic director of Southern Europe and LatAm departs
Ricardo Domingues, who had overseen brand's expansion into Portugal, leaves due to "strategic differences."
Betclic Everest’s regional director for Southern Europe and Latin America Ricardo Domingues has stepped down from his role after almost five years with the company, eGaming Review can exclusively reveal.
Sources have confirmed to eGR that Domingues has stepped down due to “strategic differences” with group chief executive Ignacio Martos, and has been replaced in the role by Betclic Expekt’s head of strategic campaigns and advertising operations Geronimo Pirro.
Domingues originally joined the company in 2007 as marketing manager for Portugal, and was instrumental in establishing the operator as one of the most visible egaming brands in the market, signing sponsorship deals with 28 of the 32 football teams in the Portuguese professional league alongside two basketball and two handball teams; one futsal and hockey side.
These deals, however, have since been put on hold as a result of a ruling by a Lisbon court in favour of the country’s monopoly operator Santa Casa di Misericórdia de Lisboa in April this year. Betclic has announced that it will suspend all operations in the market until its appeal against the ruling has been concluded.
As part of CEO Martos’ restructuring of the business Domingues was promoted to regional director in charge of 11 markets. This was initiated after he was appointed to replace Betclic co-founder Nicolas Beraud in September 2011.
This saw the operations of the group’s Betclic and Expekt brands merged, with the CEO of the joint entity Thomas Winter the first of a number of senior executives to depart. As a result the P&L of Betclic Expekt divided into three separate regions; Domingues was put in charge of Iberia and LatAm, former Betclic CMO Marc Guigo was put in charge of French, Swiss and Belgian operations, and Tomasz Mazur took control of Northern and Eastern Europe.
Since the reconfiguration of the business second Betclic co-founder Eric Monçada, and former CTO Pierrick Pétain have left the operator, with vice president of sales and marketing Christophe Blot; chief of regulatory and corporate affairs James Scicluna; head of social media Joakim Nilsson; head of central online marketing Lloyd Purser, and Pétain’s replacement as CTO Pierre Derôme have also departed.
The news comes a day after Betclic Everest announced that it had acquired full ownership of Mangas Everest, the holding company of Everest Gaming, buying out GigaMedia’s 33.33% share in the business, as part of Martos’ relaunching of the company after what he described as a “difficult” 2011 in an exclusive interview with eGR in June.