Insight
COVID-19 UPDATE - LATAM Argentina
Argentina: provinces single out igaming to turn around fortunes
Casino licenses in Argentina fall under provincial jurisdiction and as such land- based casinos are licensed by each province. Te majority are located in hotels and are designed to increase tourism in the area. On a national level casinos are less controversial than they are in the capital and they have been increasing steadily, especially in the provinces of Rosario and Mendoza. Bingo halls in Buenos Aires, meanwhile, are often large scale housing in some cases hundreds of Class III slot machines on the premises.
Casinos in a number of provinces in the country’s interior were gradually able to open their doors for a time. However casinos in La Rioja had to close again subsequently as the number of infections began to spread. Since then an increasing number of have been granted permission to open in provinces such as Santa Cruz San Juan, Catamarca and Chubut and once again in La Rioja with strict safety measures in place. The six casinos in the province of San Juan, for example, have been granted permission to reopen with reduced staff, with restricted numbers of customers, with no table games allowed.
Although casinos are banned by law there are still two large scale casinos in the capital. Tese are the ‘floating casinos’ docked permanently to the harbour, while the second is under the racetrack in the neighbourhood of Palermo downtown. Since 2003, the number of slot machines at the Palermo racetrack has expanded greatly, and today the casino now houses approximately 4,000 slot machines.
In August 2018, it was revealed that city Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta was looking at a number of options when it comes to the future of the floating casino in Buenos Aires. Te casino is an important source of income for the city finances as the local economy continues to shrink. Once the licence ends for the floating casino it may not be renewed as set down by the Buenos Aires Constitution. Te future of the floating casino has been left to the Supreme Court. Te highest court must decide whether to accept a complaint filed by the Government of Buenos Aires against a judicial measure that allows the operating company of the floating gambling halls to continue operating the business even though their contract expired in October.
In Argentina, online gaming has been permitted since 2006, but only on a province-to-province basis and there is no national law in place that regulates online gaming. At present, seven Argentine provinces are looking at new regulations to allow for online gambling, while Chaco, Misiones, San Luis, Tucumán, Neuquén, Río Negro, Entre Ríos and the province of Buenos Aires now all allow it.
THE IMPACT
In March 20, with 128 active cases in the country and three deaths, the government put in place one of the strictest quarantines in the region. “You can recover
P74 NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE / MARKET DATA
from a drop in the GDP, but you can’t recover from death,” President Alberto Fernández said and instituted a tough lockdown early in the pandemic to limit the spread of COVID-19. So began one of the world's longest and strictest nationwide lockdowns.
Responses to the outbreak have included restrictions on commerce and movement, closure of borders, and the shutting of schools and educational institutions. Te vast majority of Argentines are supportive of the lockdown, according to polls.
With about 14 million inhabitants, the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (AMBA), concentrates 90 per cent of all cases registered to date. Fernández says his priority is a venture involving the coronavirus vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca with the UK's Oxford University that would be manufactured in Argentina and Mexico, which he hopes will put the country's economy back on track.
In March, Buenos Aires Minister of Health, Fernán Quirós, initially announced that the closing of casinos and racetracks in the city of Buenos Aires would be ordered, as a preventive measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the region. “Although some may not like this situation, they are measures that we have to take,” Quirós explained at a press conference.
Among the new measures announced by the city government, after the coronavirus was first classified as a pandemic, was the ban on all events for 40 or more people. As the country went into lockdown every casino in the country was closed.
Casinos in a number of provinces in the country’s interior were gradually able to open their doors for a time. However, casinos in La Rioja had to close again
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