Greece today signed off on an agreement to sell its stake in betting and gaming monopoly OPAP for €652m, the country’s privatisation agency announced.
The Emma Delta fund backed by Greek shipping magnate George Melisanidis and Czech businessman Jiri Smejc will pay €622m in cash and the remaining €30m in annual instalments over ten years.
The completion of a deal agreed in April had been delayed by behind-closed-doors wrangling over the terms and fees of two disputed lottery contracts, one awarded to an OPAP-led consortium including Intralot and Scientific Games that Emma Delta subsequently agreed to review at a later date.
Emma Delta signing on the dotted line, albeit to acquire the OPAP stake at well below its market value of around €750m, will provide much-neeeded relief to a beleaguered Greek government looking to raise €2.6bn this year to ensure the further disbursement of further IMF bailout funds.
The most profitable of the Greek state assets put up for sale, the betting and gaming monopoly’s first-quarter profits were however down 71% to €38.9m from €131.9m, reflecting the introduction of a 30% tax on all of its gross revenues, introduced to ward off potential State Aid claims after online operators began paying the 30% rate on Greek revenues under an interim licensing arrangement from 2011.
Uncertainty also surrounds Greek government plans to restrict online betting and most other games to OPAP until 2015. Lobby group the Remote Gambling Association has called on Internal Markets Commissioner Michel Barnier to open infringement proceedings if Greece adopts the proposed amendments, which it argues are contrary to EU law.
The lobby group has also written to the Greek regulator asking it to stop reviewing the interim licences originally issued to 24 operators in 2011, arguing the real reason for the hearings was to prepare the 401-strong blacklist unveiled on 1 August. The RGA said the supporting regulations had not yet been amended to address points of non-compliance with EU law raised by Malta and the EC in their detailed opinions during the EC standstill period.
Betfair and William Hill, the first companies to exit Greece last November after new blacklisting and blocking measures were introduced despite not yet having gained EC approval, applied last month to run the Greek gambling monopoly set to be handed to OPAP. Their applications are aimed to expose the lack of a competitive and transparent tender process, as required under EU law.
In January, OPAP’s monopoly was ruled to be illegal as currently operated by Europe’s highest court, the CJEU. The joined cases had been brought by William Hill, Sportingbet and Stanleybet. The latter has also sued the Greek government and OPAP for €240m over its illegal exclusion from the land-based market.
