Rank Group casinos agrees to £5m fine over regulatory breaches
The British Gambling Commission has ordered Grosvenor Casinos to undergo a third-party audit after a series of AML and social responsibility failings.
Key takeaways:
- The Gambling Commission has imposed a £5m regulatory settlement on Rank Group-owned casino operators after identifying anti-money laundering and social responsibility failings across their land-based casino businesses. The operators must now undergo an independent audit of their AML and safer gambling controls.
- AML shortcomings included failing to update policies following 2020 regulatory changes, applying inconsistent risk assessments, allowing high-risk funds to be used without sufficient scrutiny and failing to carry out enhanced customer due diligence when required.
- The regulator also found responsibility failings involving customers who experienced substantial wins or losses without appropriate interventions.
- The penalty comes as Rank campaigns against proposal to raise the tax rate on gaming machines.
UK.- The Gambling Commission has announced a regulatory settlement under which Rank Group will pay £5m for a series of anti-money laundering and social responsibility failings. The regulator said that Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited will also undergo a third-party audit to ensure they are effectively implementing anti-money laundering and safer gambling policies, procedures and controls.
The Rank-owned entities together run 51 land-based casinos across Great Britain. Anti-Money Laundering (AML) breaches included not updating AML policies to take account of changes to the Money Laundering Regulations in 2020 and implementing policies, procedures and controls which allowed inconsistent decisions to be applied to customers with elevated money laundering risk.
The regulator also found that they had implemented unclear policies, procedures and controls, which resulted in inappropriate risk levels being ascribed to high-risk customers and high-risk sources of funds being used by customers without appropriate scrutiny. They also failed to conduct enhanced customer due diligence checks when its own policies required it.
Social responsibility failings included not carrying out safer gambling interactions with a customer during a period in which they lost £50,000 and not having a record of any safer gambling interactions with a customer who won approximately £260,000 in a short period and then lost around £250,000 in 12 days. Another case cited involved a failure to carry out safer gambling interactions with a customer, who was returning after a period of self-exclusion, until they had lost £25,000.
All £5m of the settlement will be directed to the UK government’s Consolidated Fund under the new procedure announced by the Gambling Commission in July.
Sue Young, the regulator’s Executive Director of Operations, said: “Larger enforcement cases are often associated with online gambling but, as today’s announcement shows, the risks of anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures are equally alive in the land-based sector.
“We would advise all premises-based operators to take a careful look at this case and ensure their own business is not making the same mistakes, and therefore they do not face costly and inevitable Commission action.”
Rank Group recently warned that it could have to close up to a third of its casinos and bingo venues in Britain if the government announces a significant rise in Machine Games Duty in the Autumn Budget. As well as Grosvenor Casinos, the group runs bingo halls in Britain under the Mecca brand and in Spain as Enracha.
FAQs
Why has Rank Group been penalised?
A £5m settlement was imposed after the Gambling Commission identified a range of anti-money laundering and social responsibility failings at Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited.
What anti-money laundering breaches did the Gambling Commission find at Rank Group’s operators?
The regulator found that the companies failed to update AML policies to reflect 2020 regulatory changes, applied inconsistent assessments to high-risk customers, allowed some high-risk sources of funds without proper scrutiny and did not always conduct enhanced due diligence checks when required.
