Mansion for Man City
Mansion Group has signed a deal with Manchester City to become its international betting partner and to collaborate across a wide range of commercial activities, including the extension and expan- sion of the Manchester City brand into key territories across Asia and other special commercial proj- ects of mutual interest and benefit to both parties.
EGBA tells
Commission to ‘act now’ on infringements
The EGBA wants to press on with the opportunity provided by the Green Paper, but believes the Commission still has to follow up on its threats.
EUROPE T
he European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) has told the European Commission that it is failing in its role as Guardian of the Treaties, when it comes to online gambling regulation, and added that it has ‘arguably aggravated the problem’. In its written submission to the green paper on online gambling in the Internal Market, the EGBA said the Commission needs to act on its warnings. It said: “Despite issuing numerous formal warnings on recent draft legislation for failing to comply with EU law, the Commission has not opened any infringement proceedings since early
2008. Indeed, even existing gambling infringement pro- cedures have been on hold since that date and no Member State has ever been taken to Court for failing to comply with EU law regard- ing its gambling legislation. “The Commission must act now and pursue infringement cases in a sys- tematic way to correct existing legislative flaws and to prevent new national rule-making from breach- ing EU law. If the Commis- sion continues to turn a blind eye to breaches of EU law, it is hard to see how any agreement will be reached on meaningful next steps after this consultation.” The EGBA believes that
the Green Paper provides the opportunity to examine thoroughly the state of the EU gambling market and that the questions relating to responsible gambling, such as problem gambling and fraud prevention, the protection of minors and sports integrity, cover the ‘key societal issues that need to be addressed when deciding next steps at EU level’.
It commented: “The launch of the Green Paper represents a bold and at the same time inevitable step for online gambling in the EU. Whereas others have shirked their responsibili- ties, Commissioner Barnier has taken a first step
towards a European approach in a sector char- acterised at present by unsustainable legal uncer- tainty and fragmentation.” The association also sug- gested that Europe’s incum- bent monopoly operators have nothing to fear from a regulated online gambling sector. It argued that recent deregulated markets demonstrate that the intro- duction of online gambling is not to the detriment of the existing offline market. It said that whilst the online market grows, the tradi- tional offline market con- tinues to grow in real terms as well, as do the revenues of most of the traditional land-based operators.
The EGBA continued: “Regulation of the online gambling sector is a solu- tion rather than a problem regarding societal issues. It is the only way to eradicate the black market and benefit from the high trans- parency and traceability features of the internet that have allowed the regulated industry to develop new and more effective means of protection and prevention than those traditionally available in the offline gam- bling environment. As a result, the advent of inter- net gambling has not led to an increase in problem gam- bling and the internet pro- vides better tools for instance to protect minors.”
The EGBA would like to see an EU regulatory frame- work for online gambling developed by the ‘targeted harmonisation of, inter alia, consumer protection, anti- money laundering, preven- tion of fraud and other crime, assessment of per- sonal integrity, mutual recognition of licensing pro- cedures, IT infrastructure, advertising and sponsoring, customer identification, protection of minors and sports integrity’. It also believes in the creation of a European authority whose main responsibilities would be to co-ordinate regulatory co-operation and enforce- ment and to monitor sports integrity.
THE EGBA HAS PRAISE FOR COMMISSIONER BARNIER
www.callcredit.co.uk BettingBusinessInteractive • SEPTEMBER 2011 9
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