U.S.-based Hilton Hotels has announced plans to develop two casinos inside its Kyiv, Ukraine luxury hotel. The project will get under way when and if the government legalizes gambling in hotels.
According to CDC Gaming Reports, a draft bill that would legalize hotel-based casinos passed on the first reading in January, but parliament still must vote for it in a second reading before it goes to President Volodymyr Zelensky for his signature.
Boris Fuchsman, co-owner of the hotel’s Ukrainian branch and co-founder of the 1+1 Media Group, plans to invest $30 million in the project, he told the Ukrainian media outlet The Page.
Gambling in Ukraine was banned in 2009, and “under the current law, everything connected to gambling is illegal,” Kateryna Rekiianova, an associate of Asters law firm told the Kyiv Post. Yet casinos continue to operate illegally.
Zelensky is a fan of legal gaming, and industry observers believe a law legalizing gambling could be signed in the spring of 2020.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk said legalizing the activity could also bring in more than $120 million in tax revenues to the state budget. The head of the parliament’s committee on finance, taxation and customs policy, Danylo Hetmantsev, is more optimistic, and estimates the taxes could be as high a $190 million.
According to the draft legislation, casinos will be only be permitted in five-star hotels with at least 200 rooms in designated tourist areas. In smaller cities such as Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Lviv, hotels will be allowed to install casinos if they have at least 120 rooms.
The government’s ambition is to ensure that “gambling will be conducted exclusively on the territory of hotels” while removing “gambling halls and slot machines from streets,” Honcharuk said.
Some 5,300 slots parlors are said to operate in what CDC called “a legal gray zone.” The government plans to cap the number of slot machines at 40,000 across the country, with a maximum of 250 machines in any one venue.
