The Apertum logo appears on the jersey of HNK Vukovar 1991, a club in Croatia’s top football division. It also sponsors NK Hrvace, a smaller club in the Dalmatian hinterland, roughly forty kilometres inland from Split. Apertum Holding Limited is the entity named by Germany’s financial regulator as affiliated with DAO1, the crypto investment operation associated with Josip Heit. Neither sponsorship arrangement has been fully explained by anybody involved in it.
The Croatian investigative outlet Ostro asked. Anamarija Doljanin, the daughter of the NK Hrvace club president and a volunteer at the club, said she had come across Apertum while sending sponsorship requests to companies that appeared as sponsors of other clubs. She said Apertum responded positively. She declined to reveal through whom she had come across them. HNK Vukovar 1991 did not respond to Ostro’s inquiry about how its own partnership came about.
What a Shirt Sponsorship Buys That Advertising Cannot
Sports sponsorship performs a function for an investment operation that conventional marketing cannot match. A logo on a football shirt makes no claim that can be fact checked. It carries no returns figure, no licence assertion, no statement about custody of funds, and nothing a securities regulator can characterise as a misrepresentation. What it produces instead is familiarity, and the appearance of institutional permanence, in the specific communities where the shirt is worn and watched every week.
It is also durable in a way that regulatory findings are not. A warning from a financial authority appears once, is reported for a day or two, and then recedes into search results that most prospective investors will never look for. A jersey appears every match of the season, in local news photographs, on club social media, and in the stands. For an operation whose brand names change roughly every eighteen months, buying that kind of visibility in the country where its founder was born, holds property and is under criminal investigation is not an obvious marketing choice unless visibility in that country is the point.
The mechanism has precedent across this sector. Sponsorship of sports teams and cultural institutions has repeatedly been used by investment operations to convert money into reputational standing that no advertisement could buy, and regulators have no jurisdiction over a shirt.
The Timing Sits Inside the Enforcement Wave
The sponsorships are recent. Reporting places Apertum Holding’s arrangement with NK Hrvace as beginning in August of the year in question. That window sits inside the most intense period of regulatory attention the operation has faced since the collapse of GSPartners.
Germany’s BaFin issued its consumer warning on October 2, 2025, finding that DAO1 was offering automated crypto asset services in Germany without the required permission and naming Apertum Holding Limited as an affiliated company. The Bank of Lithuania added DAO1 and Apertum Foundation to its list of entities without the right to provide financial services on October 30, 2025. The Bank of Latvia followed on December 5, 2025. South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority issued its own warning on September 7, 2026, confirming DAO1 was not authorised and that the regulator had been unable to reach anyone at the contact details DAO1 had published.
Over the same period, the County State Attorney’s Office in Split confirmed that a criminal file concerning Heit had been passed to municipal prosecutors to assess whether the elements of money laundering were present, and that investigative actions were ongoing.
Where the Money Question Sits
Ostro’s reporting raises the question of whether funds connected to DAO1 and Apertum Foundation may be moving through the football club. That is framed in the reporting as a question rather than a finding, and it should be read that way here. No authority has stated that either club has done anything improper, and nothing in the public record suggests the clubs knew anything about the regulatory position of their sponsor.
The clubs appear in this story as recipients of sponsorship money, which is an ordinary thing for a football club to be. What is not ordinary is that the person who arranged one of the deals will not say who she dealt with, and the other club will not answer the question at all. Sponsorship agreements are commercial contracts between named parties. There is normally no reason for either side to be reticent about who signed one.
The broader pattern is documented elsewhere in this operation’s history. California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation found in November 2023 that the predecessor company represented itself as a licensed bank while omitting that the licence came from a fictitious regulator, and that it threatened and initiated litigation to suppress criticism of its investments. An operation prepared to manufacture the appearance of a banking licence has an evident interest in manufacturing other kinds of legitimacy too.
What Investors Should Take From It
For anyone assessing an investment offer, a sponsorship is not evidence of anything. It establishes only that the sponsor had money and chose to spend it on visibility. It says nothing about whether the sponsor is licensed, whether client funds are segregated, whether returns are real, or whether the operation can meet redemptions. Investor protection bodies consistently advise that the only meaningful check is the regulator’s own register, and official guidance on crypto asset offerings makes the same point.
In this case the register answers the question directly. In Germany, Lithuania, Latvia and South Africa, the answer is that the operation had no authorisation at all.
Conclusion
An investment operation carrying warnings from regulators in five countries put its logo on the shirts of two Croatian football clubs. The volunteer who arranged one deal says the company answered a cold sponsorship request but will not say who she dealt with. The top-flight club did not answer questions about how its partnership was made. Neither club is accused of anything, and neither had any obvious reason to check. The sponsorships were arranged while the founder’s money laundering file sat with prosecutors in Split, and while four national regulators were telling their own citizens that the sponsor had no permission to take their money.
