Swedish parliament passes new gambling legislation
The legislation will introduce supplier licences and new safer gambling measures.
Sweden.- The proposal to introduce new online gambling supplier licences in Sweden had been in doubt after the change of government. However, the Riksdag has finally approved the move along with other changes to gambling legislation.
Spelinspektionen had already pencilled in a meeting in Stockholm on December 7 to provide information on the B2B licence regime for gaming suppliers. It has said that the application process will open on March 1, 2023.
The Swedish government proposed the introduction of B2B supplier licences in an attempt to boost channelisation. The software licences will be required from July 1, 2023. Spelinspektionen has advised suppliers to start preparing applications with the aim to submit them from March 1 in order to make the deadline.
The application fee has been set at SEK120,000 (around €10,000), and the regulator expects to initially issue about 70 licences. Only operators that work in the regulated market will be accepted for licences.
The bill also included more measures to exclude unlicensed gambling from the Swedish market, expanding the existing prohibition on promoting and advertising unlicensed gaming. Some proposed changes were not introduced, including plans to moderate the marketing of licensed gaming and to change the rules on slot games on ferries between Sweden and Finland.
Meanwhile, a permit will no longer be needed to exhibit entertainment games such as pinball, car games and LAN gaming.
Swedish gambling regulator fines three operators for AML failings
AB Trav och Galopp (ATG), Kindred and PinBet have been hit with fines totalling SEK18.9m (€1.7m) due to failings in their anti-money laundering and terrorist financing measures. The Swedish gambling regulator Spelinspektionen launched investigations into all three a year ago.
Kindred’s Spooniker was fined SEK10.9m, the highest fine that the regulator had available to it. ATG was fined SEK6m and PinBet SEK2m. Spelinspektionen investigated the activities of 13 customers at ATG and 12 each at Kindred and PinBet. The investigation focused on a period from January 1 to March 31, 2021, and in the case of Kindred, an additional period of January 1 and March 31 in 2020.
Spelinspektionen highlighted the case of a customer at Spooniker who deposited SEK80.8m over 813 times.
Spelinspektionen said: “The customer’s gambling then regularly generated alarms in the system, but when the customer was found to be winning the game, no action was taken.”
For ATG, Spelinspektionen found that most customers investigated made large deposits without the origin of the funds being checked until long afterwards. In the case of PinBet, Spelinspektionen said that only seven of the customers reviewed were flagged up by its warning system, and action was not taken for more than seven months.
Kindred said it had asked Spelinspektionen for clarification of its offence and said that it may appeal.
