888.COM FOUNDER IN THE MONEY

6 July 2007

Company's techie whizz sells 13.6 million shares

One of the founding members of the Gibraltar-based online gambling group 888.com, Shay Ben-Yitzhak (39) has reportedly sold 13.6 million shares in the company, reducing his holdings from 57.5 million to 43.9 million according to The Times newspaper in the UK.

Ben-Yitzhak has been a non-executive director of the company since mid-2006 and was formerly Chief Technical Officer. He was the man behind the technical development of 888.com, brought into the company from its inception in 1997 by founder Aharon Shaked and his brother Avi, who sold their homes and mortgaged other property, to raise about $1million and realise their dream of using the nascent Internet to provide online gambling on a global basis.

The Times reports that this is the the first sale by a senior director since the company went public, and that the buyer is believed to have been an institutional investor.

Two years back, in a profile on Ben-Yitzhak, The Independent newspaper revealed that the software engineer had never been to a casino when he was asked to handle the technical and software aspects of getting the embryo 888.com up and running. He wrote the programs for the casino site - which was the company's first - using a book on gambling.

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