Top Sport wins appeal againt fine for taking bets from foreign customers
The Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania has overturned the sanction.
Lithuania.- The gambling operator Top Sport has won an appeal against a fine for taking online bets from foreign customers. The Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania (LVAT) has overturned the €15,000 fine, which was issued by the Lithuanian gambling regulator.
The Lithuanian regulator had launched an investigation after it received anonymous complaints about the matter. It found that Top Sport had voided the gambling winnings and blocked the account of a customer who lived in Riga, the capital of neighbouring Latvia. However, the regulator decided that the operator had still breached the terms of its licence by providing betting to the customer in the first place. The fine was issued by the District Court of Vilnius.
TopSport argued that the Gambling Act does not state that a person cannot gamble in Lithuania if they are not a citizen or do not reside in the country. It also argued that Latvian law has no prohibition against its citizens gambling remotely in Lithuania.
“Legal acts of the Republic of Latvia do not prohibit Latvian citizens from participating in remote gaming organised in Lithuania, so the company had no reason to prevent a third party from participating in remote gaming,” it said. It also claimed that the use of VPNs can make it difficult to detect a customer’s physical location when they gamble online.
The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the operator, finding that Lithuanian gambling law at the time had no requirement for operators to refuse players from overseas. It said that articles of Lithuania’s Gambling Act will need to be modified to prohibit this and to allow the gambling regulator to issue fines in such instances.
The legal victory for Top Sport comes just two weeks after it lost a separate appeal against another €15,000 fine issued by the country’s gambling regulator last year. In this case, the fine was issued by the Lithuanian Gaming Control Authority in relation to breaches of self-exclusion and surveillance regulations.
In one instance, a player who had self-excluded was allowed into a retail venue. Meanwhile, cameras were incorrectly located and did not allow visibility of money changing hands at the cash register and recordings were not kept for 180 days as required. The Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the regulator’s action was “legal and reasonable” and that there were no grounds to appeal.
TopSport is one of nine operators licensed to offer online gambling in Lithuania. The Gaming Control Authority has reported that gambling revenue in Lithuania reached €116m in the first half of 2024. That’s a rise of 12.6 per cent year-on-year. Growth was driven by the online gambling market, where revenue rose 12.5 per cent to €72.2m. Player spending increased by 8.7 per cent to €1.05bn.
Category A online slots, which have unlimited winnings, generated €53.5m from player spending of €627.7m, which marked a rise of 6.2 per cent. Revenue from Category B slots, which have a maximum stake of LTL1 (€0.30) and wins of up to 200x bets, was level with last year. Meanwhile, online table games generated €6.7m, up 11.7 per cent. Top Sport remains the biggest operator on the Lithuanian gambling market.
