After months of discussions, the Italian Government has finally adopted the so called Balduzzi decree introducing gambling advertising regulations.
The new season of the international gambling conferences is upcoming and I am happy to inform you that I will be a speaker at the G2E on the 2nd of October in the session dedicated to "VLTs in Europe: Italy Greece and Beyond" and at the EiG on the 17th of October in the session dedicated to "Ensuring regulatory enforcement in a post-regulation environment". Also in general terms I will be attending most of the conferences.If you want to meet up during the conferences to discuss about the Italian and European markets, the opportunities for your company and the potential concerns, feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio....
The Italian Government has just established a task force against tax frauds in the gaming sector whose components are officers of the Ministry of Finance, the Tax Police and some tax agencies. according to the news of today.The task force will cooperate with banks and financial intermediaries with the purpose of fighting against the illegal offering of games both online and land-based and therefore their primary targets in the online sector will be the platforms that are run without an Italian remote gaming license. Indeed, after the recent Costa Cifone decisionof the European Court of Justice, apparently the strategy from the Government will not be anymore to challenge the crime of illegal offering of games without an Italian gaming license, but to...
The Administrative Court of Lazio Region held that it is not possible to have more than one VLT licensee installing its machines in the same gaming law. In November 2010 AAMS, the Italian gambling authority, had published a bulletin circular stating that it was not possible to install in the same gaming hall VLTs of 2 different licensees since such option is not prescribed by the law that on the contrary requires licensees to disclose the location of their gaming halls. Also, the presence of two different licensees in the same gaming hall would have potentially created technical issues and problems in terms of liability for misconducts, calculation of jackpots etc.. However, some licensees challenged the bulletin circular of AAMS since they argued this was a...
New Italian remote bingo draft regulations have been finally notified to the European Commission after a quite long waiting by the entire market. Italian remote bingo regulations have been subject of relevant discussions during the last years as they are based on land-based regulations and therefore contain a number of restrictions preventing online operators from the offering of all the bingo variants available on their .COM platforms.However, the long waiting seems to have reached an end as AAMS has notified to the European Commission the new bingo draft regulations which seem to be based on the same rationale of poker and casino regulations allowing a much higher level of flexibility in the offering of the game. Indeed they provide for a certification of...
As anticipated, the Italian gambling authority (AAMS) has just launched a call for tenders for the award of 2,000 new betting shop licenses. The requirements for the award of the licenses provide a starting auction price of € 11,000 per license and the entities applying for the license shall be a company based in a country of the European Economic Area and hold therein a gaming license for the operation of at least one of the types of games regulated by AAMS. Likewise, the technical infrastructure dedicated to the offering of the games shall be located in a country of the European Economic Area. Therefore as now provided for remote gaming licenses, even foreign entities that do not have any company or...
Here is a short post on the recent approval by the Italian gambling authority of fast-fold cash poker regulations. After the pressure from some licensed operators AAMS issued dedicated regulations on fast-fold poker that among others limit to 5,000 the number of players per gaming session and allow players to "enter" different tables at the same time but with the restriction of € 1,000 as maximum amount spent per gaming session. These regulations are likely to further boost Italian cash poker games that after a year from its launch reached a turnover of € 9.5 billion becoming the most online game in the market. It will be interesting to see though the battle between cash poker and online slots when the latter...
The delivery of newsletters without the individuals' prior consent has been sanctioned with 9 months of imprisonment by the Italian Court of Cassation. Article 167 of the Italian Data Protection Code punishes with the imprisonment between 6 months and 24 months the processing of personal data without the consent of the data subject (and other privacy breaches) with either the purpose to gain profit or to cause harm, provided that the harm is caused. With reference to a case where one of the major Italian Internet companies had sent newsletters without the prior consent of their recipients, the Court of Cassation, the Italian supreme court, held that:the profit generated by the defendant derives from the saving due to the lack of payment of the amount due to the service provider owner...
