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Thursday, March 29, 2018
 
by Andrew Tottenham, Managing Director, Tottenham & Co

Guillermo Fernández Vara, President of the Spanish region of Extremadura, has recently proposed legal changes which would allow for fast track planning consents and lower gambling taxes for the development and operation of large scale leisure complexes - those with a minimum investment of €1 billion. These complexes could feasibly include hotels, spas, conference centres, sports and cultural facilities and, of course, casinos, bingo halls and machine slot arcades. Other requirements would include a minimum job generation of 2,000 FTEs and hotels with a total of at least 3,000 beds, although you would be hard-pressed to build a 3,000 bed (1,500 keys) integrated resort for €1 billion. Should you manage to do all of this, you will enjoy a fixed rate gambling tax at 15 percent of Gross Gaming Revenue, instead of the marginal rate of 50 percent that currently exists in the region.

Where have I heard this before?

For those of you that do not know, Extremadura is in the west of Spain, north of Sevilla and nestled hard against the border with Portugal. It is where the famous Iberian black pigs roam free, eating acorns, before being made into delicious Pata Negra Jamon. It has national parks and beautiful scenery, but not much else.
 



by Luke Haward, CDC Gaming Reports 

Despite doing well on the balance sheets, the UK gambling industry had a pretty poor 2017 in terms of public perception and media coverage. The hubbub over the state of the sector looks set to reach an ever greater swell in the coming months; the industry has not only taken quite a beating in the press over the past year, but also weathered some significant (and oft deserved) bad publicity in the form of settlements and fines for negligence and recriminations from the Great Britain Gambling Commission (GBGC) for a range of fouls, including advertising designed to appeal to children. 

Much of the blame for the transgressions has been seen in the online sector, but the high street bookies also failed badly in a recent undercover BBC investigation into enforcement of their self-exclusion system (several online operators have failed the same tests in recent times.) The high street is, of course, also home to the dreaded fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs).

On the whole, the industry has suffered, even if the actions worthy of the repudiation that it's received were generally committed by a small percentage of total operators. 
 

The Euro News Revue
Andrew says:  Staying with Spain, the country's uncontrolled expansion of gambling is causing a backlash in Madrid. As with other countries, when there is too much gambling on the high street and too many advertisements on television, politicians see the need to act. The main problem in Madrid is that the municipal Government has no jurisdiction over gambling, but they do over planning.
Andrew says:  The UK Gambling Commission is looking to stop people from being able to fund online gaming and betting accounts using a credit card. It has always seemed strange to me that facilitating credit for gambling in land-based casinos was illegal, but was not so online.
Luke says:  This one is reminiscent of the huge £7 million-plus settlement 888 were forced to make back in August of last year for failing to adequately enforce their self-exclusion system. This one is £1 million, but the story is similar. In this case, SkyBet allowed those with self-exclusion clauses in place to open secondary accounts and gamble on. Hardly empowering stuff. Some even signed back up with the same information used to open their original accounts! What's more, 50,000 users continued to get marketing bumps after self-excluding. The fines could have been quite a bit larger, though, and that they weren't does reaffirm one's faith in good actors in the industry. Rather than try to conceal it, as surely other entities might have, SkyBet volunteered the information to the Gambling Commission. So in the end, it's well played SkyBet. After some admittedly serious failings, at least they showed some honesty.
Luke says: As part of a slew of recent changes in regulation and the publication of new guidelines for the industry, the Gambling Commission is putting out plans to make online gambling 'safer than ever.' This relates to recent scrutiny given by the Commission to child gambling, and how free-to-play games have been being offered without age restrictions. The GBGC also wants to set temporary wagering limits until affordability checks can be processed, which is a radical change indeed for the industry. Other areas where noises have been made include ease of withdrawal, protection of funds and use of credit cards in gaming. Not much yet is known about the exact nature of the reforms which will be proposed, but a review is underway which gives every sign of being substantial, and it's likely to lead to significant change for the industry in the UK.  
Luke says: What this all amounts to is that it is illegal to play in online casinos in Germany, but that law's not really being enforced. A recent article exposed the fact that some players have actually sought to reclaim losses, in some cases successfully, on the basis that the operators took their deposits illegally. It proved cheaper to pay back the losses, at least in terms of publicity, than to fight the issue in court. The argument goes that these stringent regulations governing online gaming, as well as the pull back on land-based gambling with the closure of numerous gambling halls in recent months, is driving punters into the grey or even the black markets of online wagering. When is a ban worse for problem gambling than letting operators run riot, and where is the middle road?
Luke says: The Netherlands Gaming Authority has released its annual report, and what it says about the world of online gambling makes for some serious reading. They are calling for the urgent creation of a remote gaming act to regulate online gambling provided by both foreign and domestic operators, claiming that existing legislation is hopelessly out of date (some of it, admittedly, dates back to 1964.) They single out the lack of legal resources to tackle illegal gambling operations. Specifically, although not raised in this coverage, the Dutch are concerned about several Curaçao based operations which are targeting the Dutch market. So far, the Dutch government has issued over €2 million in fines to companies from Curaçao found to have been illegally targeting Dutch players, but only around a quarter of those fines have been paid. Enforcement is still an intractable issue, especially when operating internationally. 
Luke says: Binance is a massive cryptocurrency exchange, the largest in the world in terms of total trading volume, so the fact that it's found its way to a new home in Malta after regulations were tightened in Hong Kong, China and Japan is a pretty key indicator of how significant Malta is becoming in the crypto world. This is no real surprise, though, given that Malta are passing a slew of regulations to become more crypto friendly and that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has talked openly about making the country the Silicon Valley of crypto, saying, "We must be on the frontline in embracing this crucial innovation." The PM has further been quoted, in the wake of Binance's move, as saying he wanted Malta to be known as "the blockchain island". Given this, Malta seems likely to be a haven for all things crypto and ICO for the foreseeable future.   
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