New Italian gaming legislation will be ready this month
Italy aims to hold more tenders for concessions and to tighten controls against illegal gaming.
Italy’s undersecretary for the economy with responsibility for gaming, Federico Freni, has outlined plans to bring a delegated law for the reorganisation of gaming to the Council of Ministers and parliament this month.
Freni hopes that Italy will be able to hold more regulated tenders, but with clear regulations in place.
He said: “Tax revenue is high and on the rise. This could indicate a particular state of health of the sector, but in reality it only indicates a growing propensity to gamble which must make us think that not only we have a duty to increase the level of regulation, but also the supervisory threshold of the distortions of illegality and gambling addiction that affect the healthy enjoyment of the game.”
Freni said existing legislation was out of date and prevented a stable, homogenous system.
He said: “The sector is the subject of an approach that dates back to 2016 and which is based on continuous extensions of concessions, at an annual level, with the consequent impossibility of carrying out tenders.
“This is a system that we want to put an end to, because continuing to extend the concessions on an annual basis does not guarantee tenders, which, under current legislation, take away at least a year and a lot of work.
“The solution is not to close the sector, but to regulate it, in a definite and definitive way, putting an end to episodic regulations that last a morning and instead create stable rules that allow operators, even foreign operators, to access the market on an equal and stable basis, relying on a defined regulatory framework that is not subject to the annual decision of the legislator.”
He added: “This will be included in an enabling law that we hope will be ready by November and which must be combined with a system of extensions.”
Italy’s current system has led to legal battles between gambling operators and the regulator ADM over the expiry of gaming licences.
Yesterday, the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio ruled that current online gaming licences must be extended until December 2022.
