Online Gambling News from Spain, Belgium and Portugal

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Last week there has been online gambling news from three European countries. The liberalization of online gambling in Spain has taken a bizarre turn. Belgium is relentless in its opposition to unlicensed online gambling, whereas Portugal is contemplation generating revenues from online gambling.

The Spanish land based gambling group Codere has adopted an aggressive strategy to get rid of potential competition in the newly liberalized and regulated market in the country. It has launched a series of legal actions seeking injunctions against leading European online gambling operators. Its argument is that the operators that illegally accessed the Spanish online gambling market in the period before liberalization gained an unfair commercial advantage. During that period Codere, being a Spanish company, was compelled to stay away from online gambling. In order to compensate for this, Codere is demanding that the pre-liberalization operators should be made to start all over again, and even pay some sort of deferred taxation penalty.

Codere has targeted the big fish like Bwin, PokerStars and Sportingbet. Codere got an injunction from a Madrid court to block Sportingbet's Miapuesta website, forcing the online gambling operator to pay €2 million as a deposit to vacate the injunction and fight the legal battle in court. In the case of PokerStars a court in Barcelona declined to award the injunction.

Now that Belgium has launched a regulatory regime, it wants unlicensed online gambling operators out of the market. The steps that had already been initiated in this regard by the Belgian Gambling Commission had included instructing Internet Service Providers to block access to the web sites and threatening action against institutions involved in payments processing for these operators. Now the blacklist has been sent to the national police by the office of the public prosecutor for necessary action where possible. The Belgian regulatory authority has simultaneously sent a message that illegal operators who close their web sites to Belgian players would be taken of the blacklist.

The Portugal News cited an unidentified source from the Portuguese ministry of economy confirming that the Government expects to collect up to €250 million from online gambling concessions this year. Online gambling is currently illegal in Portugal. The funds generated through the proposed gambling concessions would be ear-marked as a means to partly cover the costs of bankers' retirements in 2012, which have been estimated at €478 million. No news is available on what online gambling verticals are intended to be covered or on the nature of concessions that will be offered. It has been reported that the intent to raise funds in this manner has been recorded in an internal Government document towards the end of last year.

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