The Irish operator’s Ladies’ Day ad for the Cheltenham Festival (pictured above) which asked viewers to pick out the ‘stallions’ from the ‘mares’ by deciding whether the race-goers featured were men or women, was pulled from UK television screens after the ASA received complaints from viewers calling it ‘degrading’, ‘hateful’ and ‘transphobic’.

Following an investigation, the ASA this morning upheld that intial decision, stating that while it “considered that by suggesting that trans women would look like men in drag and that their gender could be speculated on as part of a game”, the ad was in breach of advertising codes governing social responsibility and harm and offence because the ad “irresponsibly reinforced negative stereotypes” and “condoned and encouraged harmful discriminatory behaviour and treatment.”

Paddy Power had defended itself by arguing it had taken care to comply with “the spirit and the letter” of the relevant codes, and had consulted transgender support group the Beaumont Society on the script to “ensure that the sensitivities of the transgender and transsexual communities were taken into account.”

But the Beaumont Society said that the part of the voiceover stating “dog, I mean man” that accompanied the shot of a woman walking out of a men’s toilet, that breached BCAP Code rule 4.2, had not not been included in the copy of the script submitted to them for approval. The ASA deemed ” the reference to a woman as a dog” as “likely to cause serious offence to women generally and trans women specifically.”

The support group did however admit it had been responsible for Paddy Power using the term “transgendered”, which they now understood to be offensive to some sections of the community they served.

February’s ban followed just days after that handed out to another of Paddy Power’s ads, Chav Tranquiliser, which featured people being shot with tranquiliser darts in an attempt to remove the ‘chavs’ from the Cheltenham Festival.

The ASA’s remit does not however cover Paddy Power’s Irish-registered YouTube channel, where the Ladies Day ad, promoted by Paddy Power  as a “banned TV ad”, has now racked up more than 600,000 views, with Chav Tranquiliser clocking up more than 1.4 million.

For more on Paddy Power’s headline-grabbing promotions, visit PaddyPower.com.

As reported on Casino Choice this week, the owner of the PartyPoker and bwin brands – the latter of which can be seen adorning the football shirts of newly crowned Spanish champions Real Madrid – is among several European operators hit with large retrospective tax bills just weeks before the Spanish regulator is due to hand out the first long-awaited online gaming licences.

Teufelberger (pictured above) said: “Officially there is no context between the grant of the licence and the taxes they may claim. We are in discussion with the tax office as well, but it is very hard to perceive what the outcome will be.”

When asked by analyst Ed Birkin of Barclays Capital if the company could potentially withdraw its licence application in Spain if forced to pay the retrospective tax bill in full, Teufelberger said: “It’s difficult as it’s hypothetical. I will not disclose how discussions are going with them…We believe they have no claim to ask for four years of back taxes, but again, this is a discussion we have separately with the tax office, and we are talking to the government as well at the same time.”

The company expected to hear whether or not bwin.party was among the first wave of licensees before June, said the Austrian executive:  “We expect that will be announced prior to June 1, when the first licences will be handed out, and that’s the last information that we have.”

The bwin.party co-CEO was speaking as the company formed from the merger of bwin and PartyGaming last year unveiled flat revenue for the three months to the end of March, up just 1% year-on-year to €215.9m, a performance well behind peers such as William Hill Online, which grew revenue by 33% and 888, up 25%. Paddy Power is expected to unveil 26% year-on-year growth tomorrow, according to analyst David Jennings of Davy Stockbrokers in Dublin.

The operator blamed the 1% decline in sports betting to €70.6m on a tough margin comparative in the same period last year and having to exit the newly regulated Danish market on 1 January because “[w]e didn’t have the opportunity to get the bwin platform compliant with the regulations there, so we had to shut that down”, according to CFO Martin Weigold. This was despite the company having  a Danish licence and the market opening being delayed by a year due to a European State Aid case.

Teufelberger explained the delay on having “chosen to go ahead and integrate the platforms first instead of launching on various platforms in various labels in different countries. That process will be over in six months and we won’t have that issue any more.”

Casino provided the one operational bright spot for a company grappling with the cost and logistics of launching in highly taxed markets across Europe while also integrating platforms and delivering promised merger-related savings of €65m this year. The launch of table games in Italy last July helped lift casino revenue 10% to €71m. Poker however continued its decline, down 3% year-on-year to €52.2m, while bingo was down 15% due to €15.6m due to ” increased competition and cannibalisation of our Italian bingo revenue by the introduction of casino-style games”  according to bwin.party’s other CEO Jim Ryan.

The company added it expected shortly to receive a sports betting licence in the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein – which issued licences to Betfair and two other operators on 3 May – despite the return to power of the Socialist party that opposed the legislation. “It’s not going to be legally very simple to just change the law”, argued Teufelberger. “We have to wait and see what ‘s gong to happen. We have been very upfront, that we had two choices, either go onshore with our Schleswig-Holstein, which is our preferred option, or continue operating in Germany as is.”

bwin.party will also host an analyst briefing later this month on its strategy to enter the social gaming market. Teufelberger revealed “a fairly small acquisition” would form part of the company’s plan.

The relaunched GalaCasino.com site went live ahead of the weekend, with Gala Poker migrating across to Playtech’s iPoker platform from the Ongame network  sold by bwin.party to US land-based casino supplier ShuffleMaster for €29.5m in March.

With Coral betting already running on the Geneity sportsbook platform acquired by Playtech for an initial £11m earlier this year, the online gaming software supplier only has the migration of Gala Bingo from a proprietary platform onto its own Virtue Fusion bingo network left to complete.

Playtech’s deal with Gala Coral (CEO Carl Leaver pictured above) to supply all of its online gaming and betting products is worth a reputed €5m a year to the supplier. Playtech provides the gaming products (casino, poker and bingo) to the UK’s best performing operators of recent years – bet365 and William Hill – with the latter also benefitting from the injection of affiliate and marketing assets by Playtech into William Hill in 2008 for a 29.5% share in the William Hill Online JV.

But with William Hill having narrowly survived a shareholder revolt last week over an incentive package awarded to CEO Ralph Topping, the software provide could find itself challenged at tomorrow’s AGM in the Isle of Man over several issues. These include the proposed re-election of chairman Roger Withers, the urgent need to appoint more non-executive directors to its board and its strategy of buying businesses from founder and 48% shareholder Teddy Sagi.

Should the full consideration for the PTTS business it acquired from Sagi last July be triggered, the Playtech founder stands to make around £385m  from selling businesses he owns back to Playtech since the company listed on London’s AIM market in March 2006. He also made £165m at the float, potentially taking the amount Sagi has taken out of the company since it listed to approximately £550m.

Playtech CFO David Mathewson said at the group’s first quarter results presentation two weeks ago that it remained optimistic of hitting its target of moving to a Premium Listing on London’s main list by the end of June, having cleared one corporate governance hurdle by buying out chairman Roger Withers’ 300,000 shares for £500,000.

The country’s parliament in March approved a bill that would require all Bulgarian and foreign online gambling operators to be licensed and regulated by the country’s State Gambling Commission. However, as reported by Casino Choice at the time, the tax rate in the bill was set at 15% of operator turnover, twice the level of the tax which has crippled the development of the regulated online sports betting market in France.

However, a source from the ruling party Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (CEDB) told the Focus news agency yesterday that the tax would cut to around 6% to 8% because a tax rate of 15% would make it impossible for operators to build a profitable business in the territory if they were returning more than 95% of sports betting stakes to players.

“Thus no foreign operator would come to Bulgaria”, a source from the Parliamentary Budget and Finance Committee explained to the news agency.

Under the legislation passed in March, any gambling web doman not registered with the State Gambling Commission will be placed on a blacklist of illegal sites, with Internet Service Providers (ISP) facing prosecution and fines of up to £8,500 if they fail to block Bulgarian players’ access to sites on the blacklist.

Players will also have to register before they’re allowed to partake in online sports betting, casino games and poker. Bulgarian MPs are also discussing the implementation of strict rules regarding exactly where advertising gambling can take place in the country.

According to politicians from the CEDB at the time the legislation was passed in March, the new licensing and regulatory regime would bring in around €50m in additonal annual tax revenue.

The online gambling market in Eastern Europe remains largely unregulated in countries where the websites are accessed by consumers, with most operators licensed in low-tax jurisdictions within the European Economic Area. Operators’ right under Articles 56 and 49 of the EU Treaty to freely offer online gambling into Member States from jurisdictions within the EEA has however been eroded by a series of recent ECJ decisions. These legal precedents have supported the establishment of dot.country licensing and tax regimes for online gambling in Italy, France and Denmark.

Bet365, PokerStars bwin, Sportingbet and Betfair, which have been paying taxes in Spain since last July under the Spanish Gaming Act passed last year, are among the companies now locked in discussions with the Spanish tax office over resolving the issue ahead of the 1 June licensing date confirmed last week by the Spanish regulator.

Earlier reports of sports betting leader Sportingbet facing a tax bill of €50m are however incorrect – Casino Choice understands the company’s potential liability is less than €20m – suggesting speculation over PokerStars having to settle a bill of €200m and bwin.party of €60m ahead of 1 June may also be wide of the mark.

The last-minute demands for back-dated tax from non-Spanish companies were unexpectedly imposed last week by a Conservative government faced with implementing unpopular austerity measures aimed at cutting the country’s budget deficit amid a tough economic climate. The Spanish unemployment rate hit 24% in the last quarter.

However, Spanish land-based operator Codere has long been lobbying government officials over what it cites as “illegal competition” from and non-payment of taxes by online operators. In late March, Sportingbet was forced to turn off its Spanish operations after the Mercantile Court of Madrid rejected Sportingbet’s appeal against a December ruling in favour of Codere, effectively cutting off the group’s earnings from its second largest market until its licensing status in the country had been confirmed.

Codere’s action against Betfair is due to be heard again on 1 June, the very same day the Spanish regulator is to issue the first online gambling licences. Head Spanish regulator Enrique Alejo has confirmed his organisation received between 55 and 60 licence applications to offer betting, poker, blackjack, roulette and baccarat in the territory, based on a tax rate of 20-25% of gross profit. Slots, bingo in-play betting have not yet been included in the regulation.

Bet365, PokerStars, Betfair, bwin, Ladbrokes, 888, William Hill and Paddy Power are among the pan-European operators known to have applied for permits in Spain.

Rank has conditionally agreed to pay £205m in cash for 23 of Gala’s casinos, the successful acquisition of which would see Rank run 58 licensed properties in the UK, leapfrogging Malaysian casino operator Genting, which currently has 44. Rank will fund the buy through new three-year bank facilities of £175m as well as extending existing terms.

The announcement of the conditional agreement this mornng follows the two parties finding workable solutions to the issues – reportedly relating to Gala Casinos’ pension liability and property ownership – that led to the breakdown of initial talks in late March. The deal excludes Gala Coral’s Gibraltar and Dundee casinos and freehold properties owned by Gala Coral.

Chairman and CEO of Rank Ian Burke said the company was delighted to have agreed terms with owners Gala Coral and that the buy would “deliver a step change in Rank’s earnings”. The company said it expected the transaction to be earnings enhancing for Rank in the first full year of ownership.

The company will rebrand nine of the acquired properties under its G Casino offline and online brand, and extend Rank’s land-based casino estate into 11 UK cities currently unserved by its current chain of 35 properties.

The acquisition, which Rank said its expects to complete before the end of third quarter on 30 September, is conditional upon the approval of Rank shareholders and clearance by UK merger authorities.

Rank’s 74.5% majority shareholder, Malaysian investment conglomerate Guoco Group, has already said it will vote in favour of the acquisition at a soon-to-convened general meeting.

Microgaming, the casino games supplier to 32Red, walked off with the prestigious RNG Casino Supplier of the Year trophy, awarded by a panel of independent judges, while Bet365’s primary provider Playtech won Slot Provider of the Year. Swedish business Net Entertaiment took home both innovation awards for slot provision and RNG casino.

Roger Raatgever, CEO of Microgaming, which also picked up a highly commended for its poker software, said the Isle of Man-based company was “delighted” with the award. “We constantly strive to provide market-leading software and this award recognises our commitment to always stay one step ahead of our peers in the eGaming industry.”

Playtech also went home with the awards for bingo network and poker network of the year, while the Mobenga mobile business it acquired for up to €23.8m last July also picked up Mobile Supplier of the Year. Paddy Power, Ladbrokes and William Hill’s sportsbook platform provider OpenBet was recognised as Sport Betting Supplier of the Year.

888’s Dragonfish B2B division also added the poker software award to the Poker Operator of the Year award its parent company picked up at last November’s eGR Operator Awards, recognising the huge recent success of its recreational player-focused Poker 6 platform and PokerCams.

Now in their third year, the eGR B2B awards recognise excellence among the leading service providers and suppliers to online casinos, poker rooms, bingo websites and sportsbooks. The full list of winners in the software/network categories can be found below.

eGR B2B Awards 2012 winners – software/network categories

Affiliate software of the year: NetRefer

White label partner of the year: SpotOption

Bingo network of the year: Playtech

Bingo supplier of the year: GTECH G2

Innovation in bingo: mkodo

Skill games supplier of the year: GameAccount Network

RNG casino supplier of the year: Microgaming

Slot provider of the year: Playtech

Live casino supplier of the year: Evolution Gaming

Innovation in slot provision: Net Entertainment

Innovation in RNG casino software: Net Entertainment

Lottery software supplier of the year: GTECH G2

Poker network of the year: Playtech

Poker software of the year: Dragonfish

Sports betting supplier of the year: OpenBet

Innovation in sports betting software: Sporting Solutions

Mobile supplier of the year: Mobenga

Innovation in mobile: Scratchino

Social gaming supplier of the year: NextGen Gaming

Software rising star of the year: Sporting Solutions

The five-reel, 243 ways-to-win slot features crystal clear graphics and combines a number of brand-new innovations developed by Isle of Man-based casino developer Microgaming, all set to become integral to players’ online slots experience in the future.

In Collect-A-Wild, when players have accumulated four Wild tokens for each Wild symbol that lands on a reel, the entire reel turns “Wild” on the next spin and remains so for the following four. With up to five reels able to turn “Wild”, this ups the chances of significant pay-outs for players at 32Red.

The chances of free spins and player rewards are also increased via the Lucky Nudge feature, triggered by Scatter symbols appearing around the reel edges. Finally, the landmark new Gamble feature allows punters to adjust their gamble odds, allowing the player to gamble a single win as many times as desired. Players can however still bank 50% of the win, however, allowing them to exercise greater control over their personal wagering strategies.

Microgaming’s long-awaited new slot based on the iconic Shoot football brand, announced back in February, also went live this week. Microgaming develoed the game featuring imagery from the football magazine after agreeing a deal with Pedigree Group Limited, the owner of the Shoot brand.

Roger Raatgever, CEO, Microgaming, said: “We are pleased to be associated with this renowned brand.”

To experience Untamed – Bengal Tiger and Shoot, visit 32Red.com.

Betsson, Bet-At-Home, BetClic, Expekt, Stan James, 188 and Betway are also among the latest group of 10 dot.coms to be blocked by the four largest internet service providers under the country’s gaming legislation. According to the amended legislation which came into force on 1 January last year, online operators without a Belgian licence now face potential fines of up to €100,000 for “facilitating”, “advertising” or “recruiting” for illegal games of chance in Belgium. Players in the country also face fines of up to €25,000 for playing on sites that haven’t been licensed by the Commission.

The sports betting blacklist was published at the same time the Commission confirmed the issue of online gaming permits to three Belgian-licensed offline sports betting operators – Betfirst.be, Vincennes.be and PMU-owned Bingoal.be -  with a further 20 granted to physical gaming arcade operators and four to bricks ‘n’ mortar casino operators.

As revealed back in January and confirmed this week, PokerStars was the only operator without an offline licence in Belgium that has been granted an online licence in the territory, by dint of its partnership with Belgian casino owner Circus Groupe, which began back in 2010. Under the Belgian Royal Decree that came into effect last year, licences are restricted to licensed land-based gaming entities in Belgium, with nine A+ licences on offer to casinos, 34 F1+ permits to sports betting operators and around 180 B+ licences  to arcade operators.

888, Everest Poker, Titan Poker and Winamax were among the dot.coms blocked in February and March of this year. However, the Belgian list at this stage only contains 30 domains, a tiny number compared to the 4,025 of varying suffixes on the blacklist of Italian regulator AAMS.

Total revenue fell 11.5% year-on-year to US$5.3m from US$6m in the first quarter of 2012, which the company said “partly reflects increased amortization of royalties paid to a major third party brand licensor and also higher amortization charges for new games”. CryptoLogic’s main published revenue streams are hosted casino games on websites including Betfair, PartyCasino, Bet365 and Paddy Power and branded games based around content licensed from comic publishers including Marvel and DC Comics.

Fresh from its recent success in reporting a first annual profit since 2007 as the effects of a 2010 restructuring hit home, CrytoLogic’s net loss in the three months to 31 March increased to US$2.2m from $0.6m, despite the company bolstering its portfolio of revenue-producing games from 212 to 229 in the period.

Cryto’s loss came amid uncertainty over when Canadian gaming group Amaya would complete its acquisition of the business. The quarter saw Amaya extend its Crypto board member-approved offer to acquire the acquire entire issued capital of the Toronto-listed group for US$35.8m on no less than three occasions, with shareholder acceptance of the offer only 2% higher at 88.15% on 2 May than it had been on 18 April.

Last month also saw Amaya CEO David Baazov and CFO Daniel Sebag assume the same roles at the head of CryptoLogic, with interim CEO and full-time chairman David Gavagan and CFO Huw Spiers stepping down.

In January, CryptoLogic also became a B2C online casino business, acquiring the Maltese licences of InterCasino, its first-ever licensee back in 1996 and still its largest client. CryptoLogic already owned the InterCasino domains.

Intercasino offers the full range of CryptoLogic’s Marvel-ous superheroes slots. Find out more at Intercasino.com.