Swedish gambling regulator fines Bayton for failure to report board change
Bayton Limited has agreed to pay a penalty fee of SEK35,000 (€3,359).
Sweden.- Bayton Limited has agreed to pay SEK35,000 (€3,359) to Swedish gambling regulator Spelinspektionen as a penalty fee for failing to report a change on its board of directors.
The company, which operates Jackpot City Casino, Ruby Fortune and Spin Casino, replaced a board member in April 2019 but didn’t tell the regulator.
The oversight was uncovered in a Spelinspektionen inspection in July 2020. It found that a member of Bayton’s board had resigned on April 11, 2019, and had been replaced without it being informed.
Bayton said it had prepared a notification message to send to the regulator but due to an internal error had never sent it. It says it has made all efforts to ensure a similar mistake does not occur in the future. All relevant teams have been reminded of the importance of complying with reporting rules, it said.
The company noted that the board member in question had been through several reviews as a member of the board of Whitfield Management, which owns the fiduciary services business Bellerive Trust, which is based in the Channel Islands.
Spelinspektionen accepted the operator’s mitigating factors and classed the violation as “less serious”. However, it stressed the importance of reporting duties to avoid operators being able to appoint new boards after they gain a gaming licence. It bases its fines on annual company gross gaming revenue in Sweden, which for Bayton it calculated at SEK14.6m.
Last week, Spelinspektionen published its interim report on the impact of Sweden’s temporary online casino restrictions which were imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It found that the impact of the measures was impossible to determine but still said it would support their use in the future.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s government has approved proposals for new safer gambling and consumer protection measures, including new limits on advertising and measures against unlicensed operators.
