Bulgaria’s gambling regulator has added ten more to its blacklist of websites deemed to be targeting the country’s online gambling market without a local licence.
French poker cash games leader Winamax.fr and horse-racing website Zeturf.com are the highest-profile new additions. Unlike in Italy, where the regulated dot.it player pool is completely ring-fenced, French-licensed poker websites are allowed to accept players from other countries, including Bulgaria.
The BGC’s blacklist now contains more than 140 websites, with most of Europe’s leading online operators having domains on the list, including PokerStars, William Hill, Bet365, 888, Betfair, Ladbrokes, Betfred, Sportingbet, Bet-At-Home, Betsson, BetVictor and Unibet.
Bulgaria, which amended its Gambling Act in July 2012 to provide a framework for the licensing and regulation of operators, finally issued its first licence for remote sports betting to locally owned incumbent vBulletin earlier this month.
vBulletin, associated with controversial Bulgarian casino billionaire Vasil Bozhkov, already held two of three national licences for offline sports betting – the other being held by the Bulgarian Sports Totaliser – and currently operates the Eurobet.bg and Eurofootball.bg websites off a Malta licence.
The Bulgarian government has however yet to confirm how much vBulletin and other future licensees will be paying in gambling duty, having earlier proposed an effectively unworkable rate of 15% of stakes.
Despite former regulatory boss Ivan Enicherov informing local media that the BGC was only blacklisting sites which actively targeted Bulgarian consumers, the list still contains siteswhich don’t even offer a Bulgarian language option, such as WilliamHill.com, and others which exited the market some time ago, such as Offsidebet.
Article written by Stephen Carter
