Greek officials said the country’s new online gambling licensing rules have been finalized and Greece is expected to start taking applications in October.
Greek Deputy Finance Minister Trifon Alexiadis told the country’s legislators that provisions for new online gambling licensing rules have been finalized earlier this month. He said the new rules would be made public “in a maximum of one month,” according to reports.
Gambling Compliance then reported that Greece expects to begin taking applications in October.
Alexiadis also told reporters that the new rules reflect lessons learned form 2011 when the government issued 24 ‘temporary’ online gambling licenses. The licenses were suspended a year later as the government sought to boost the value of Greek betting monopoly OPAP ahead of the government’s sale of its one-third stake in the company, according to calvinayre.com.
Alexiadis also said the Greek government wants to limit online gambling companies who “avoid paying huge amounts of taxes, simply because they are established in other countries.”
The new laws will include stricter vetting of how much betting operators are earning from Greek gamblers and will include “reporting to the competent Greek authorities by foreign payment providers who are active in Greece” so that “financial transactions in conducting games of chance via the internet between Greek players and foreign companies can be more easily detected.”
Under the country’s new gambling laws, gambling revenue will be taxed at 35 percent.
Greece has also been increasing the number of sites on its blacklist, doubling the number to 847 since the beginning of the year, calvinayre.com reported.
