Industry News
U.S. Unable to Enforce Anti-Gambling Law
-some of the many startling facts of business life in America which are making the recently passed anti-Internet gambling law almost impossible to enforce, experts are saying.
According to Lawrence Walters, an attorney who specializes in online gaming laws, if one reads the legislation, one quickly discovers that it makes online gambling laws more unclear than they were before President Bush signed the law in October, a few weeks before the mid-term elections in America.
"The version of the legislation that finally passed is an arbitrary, poorly-drafted, vague set of prohibitions that only serve to further complicate the muddled mess that is online gaming regulation in the U.S.," said Walters. "The remaining provisions of the legislation are contradictory, and attempt to incorporate provisions of existing state or federal law in order to define what activity constitutes unlawful Internet gambling."
A Major League Mess
That's making a major league mess, so to speak, for the financial industry to deal with. Leading critics of online gambling prohibition are the banks, "which would not only be required to track all financial transactions to ensure that they aren't related to online gambling, but stop the ones that are as well," said Walters.Community Bank lobbyist Steve Verdier explained that "it's very tempting" for legislators in Washington D.C. "to think the banking industry can stop this kind of stuff because people pay for it through banks, but the fact is the system just wasn't really designed to do it."
Despite this situation, at least one online casino firm has put aside its American expansion plans, and is looking to Italy for a new operations center, and is working Italian betting company Pianeta Scommesse, establishing it as a government-accredited bookmaker in Italy. "We plan to invest around Euro 100 million ($128 million) to develop retail, Internet and telephone betting propositions in Italy over the next five years," said Ladbrokes, PLC's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chris Bell.
The investment by Ladbrokes in Pianeta Scommesse, one of Italy's biggest betting setting services, gives the English firm the legal right to offer betting in Italy, where total gambling sales were about $28 billion last year, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Rosemary Thorne said.
Italy continues to liberalize its online gambling market, which will dramatically increase the number of Italian betting outlets. Today, about 30 percent of the 7,000 new facilities are dedicated betting shops
Ladbrokes has made further international moves in Vietnam, where it was on the final list of three firms vying to operate national the sports lottery, and in Turkey too, said Thorne.
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