The Greek gambling regulator has told parliament that the value of the country’s online gambling market has been “crosschecked” and is worth around €1bn, or €200m in gross profits to operators.
The executive president of the Hellenic Gaming Commission, Evgenios Giannakopoulos, made the disclosure to the Greek parliament’s Committee of Institutions and Transparency last week.
Giannakopoulos estimated the total size of the illegal market in Greece, including land-based and online channels, to be equivalent to that of the current €6bn legal market.
While he admitted that these figures were “only conjectures” and that there “was no serious evidence” to help estimate the actual amount of illegal gambling going on in Greece, Giannakopoulos told officials there was “an element which is crosschecked”, namely betting and gaming via remote channels, according to a translation by Greek Reporter.
Total remote wagering amounted “to about €1bn”, Giannakopoulous told the Committee, “which leads to a gambling gross profit of about €200m”.
Greek authorities presumably obtained reliable data on the Greek online market from August 2011 when they passed laws providing for the eventual licensing and regulation of online gambling and started collecting taxes from around 24 online operators under an interim licensing scheme. These operators included Sportingbet, and Paddy Power, among others.
The Greek government however performed a dramatic volte face the following year, choosing to instead restrict online betting and most other games to monopoly OPAP until at least 2020 and introduce accompanying sanctions aimed at blocking all other operators from the market.
The proposed amendments to its gambling law submitted to the EC in March stipulate that until 12 October 2020, online gambling licences will only be granted to operators other than OPAP “for casino-type games of chance, the results of which are not provided by a random number generator as in poker tournaments.” These also strike out Article 46 of Law 4002/2011 providing for the award of multiple licences via an international tender process, thus reneging on Greece’s earlier commitment to license the 24 companies which had begun paying taxes.
Industry lobby groups the RGA and EGBA last week submitted a fresh complaint to the European Commission over the non-compliance of Greece’s gambling regime with EU law. There are now five outstanding complaints lodged against OPAP’s monopoly, four with the EC, another with the Greek Council of State.
In January, Europe’s highest court the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), ruled OPAP’s monopoly to be illegal as currently operated, following joined cases brought by Stanleybet, William Hill and Sportingbet.
Stanleybet last week also notified Greek authorities and OPAP of its intention to claim €240m in damages resulting from Greek authorities’ refusal of a Group’s betting licence to operate and its long-term exclusion from the market.
Article written by Peter Holmes
