President of Romanian gambling regulator rejects call to attend parliamentary hearing
Gheorghe-Gabriel Gheorghe had been summoned to provide answers for the regulator’s severe failings.
Romania.- Gheorghe-Gabriel Gheorghe, president of Romania’s national gambling regulator, the ONJN, rejected a summons to appear before a parliamentary hearing of the IT Committee. Diana Stoica, a deputy with Save Romania Union (USR), had called for him to appear to provide answers after the Court of Accounts (CCR) called for a criminal investigation after its damning audit report of the ONJN.
Gheorghe reportedly questioned the USR’s authority to summon a regulatory agency. He also claimed that the IT Committee, which is chaired by USR senator Ciprian Rus, had failed to understand the complexity of the CCR’s findings and said that the regulator had already taken measures to rectify its failings. He asked Parliament to reschedule the hearing and said he would detail the measures the regulator had taken.
Rus said: “ONJN is subordinate to the Romanian Government and, according to the Constitution and the laws in force, is accountable to parliamentary control. However, it seems that President Gheorghe Gabriel Gheorghe is not aware of this.”
Serious irregularities were found in the regulator’s auditing of gambling licences, including a lack of supervision of authorisation fees and gambling tax. It was reported that the ONJN failed to detect potential discrepancies in return-to-player (RTP) levels that may have caused the state to lose between 3.3 and 4.3bn lei (€630m to €900m) in gambling tax revenues.
The audit found that the regulator had never verified financial data submitted by gambling companies, failed to verify gambling licence fees and had not issued penalties when required.
Gheorghe has been president of the ONJN since November 2023 and is the fifth person to serve in the position since 2018. The CCR report did not criticise him personally. The ONJN claims that the failings identified in the report were the result of old IT systems, although the CCR suggested that it was the regulator’s duty to keep its systems up to date.
In the meantime, the USR has proposed replacing the ONJN’s supervision of the gambling sector with the national tax agency ANAF for land-based gambling and the National Bank for online gambling. It’s also proposed that gambling spend be limited at 10 per cent of players’ monthly income for both online and land-based activity.
