Two commissioners reappointed to British Gambling Commission
John Baillie and Catharine Seddon will serve on the Commission’s board until April 10 2024.
UK.- Nadine Dorries, the UK secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport has reappointed two Gambling Commission commissioners, John Baillie and Catharine Seddon. They will start new periods of service on December 31 and will serve until April 10.
The British regulator’s board comprises eight commissioners under chair Marcus Boyle.
Baillie is a Chartered Accountant and a former partner of KPMG in Scotland and London. He is a former chair of the Accounts Commission for Scotland, the Scottish local authority watchdog, and served two, three-year terms.
He was also chair of Audit Scotland, the Scottish equivalent of the National Audit Office for several years, and a member of the Reporting Panel of the UK Competition and Markets Authority for nine years. He was also a visiting professor of accountancy at the University of Edinburgh and has previously held appointments at other Scottish universities.
Meanwhile, Seddon has been senior independent director for The Gambling Commission since 2017. She is also deputy chair and chair of the audit and governance committee of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and senior independent director of the Legal Services Board.
With 14 years of public service as a non-executive director, principally for national regulators, Seddon has recently joined the board of the Children and Family Courts Advisory and Support Service. She previously held non-executive and committee roles with the Human Tissue Authority and The Pensions Regulator.
Seddon sits on tribunals in mental health and employment, as a lay assessor on civil cases in the county courts and she is a presiding magistrate in Central London. She tutors for the Civil Service College and is a member of the Health Service Products Appeal Tribunal and a trustee for CPotential, a special needs charity. She also spent twenty years as a film documentary maker, including at the BBC and C4 before setting up her own independent production company.
British Gambling Commission reportedly investigating ten suicides
Last week it emerged that the Gambling Commission is reportedly investigating whether ten suicides have links to gambling. It’s written to operators to ask them whether they had accounts registered to the men at the time they took their own lives. The list of names is said to include that of the former footballer Joey Beauchamp.
The Substack news account Earnings and More says it has seen a letter sent to many gambling operators in the UK in which the Gambling Commission says: “At this stage we simply ask (that) you review your customer database and advise whether you have any records of a customer relationship with any of these individuals”.
Last year, the Gambling Commission fined Aspers Casino in Stratford, London, £650,000 for social responsibility failings after an investigation found that a 37-year-old customer killed himself the same night that he lost £25,000 playing roulette and slot machines.
Back in 2020, the Gambling Commission found that Playtech’s subsidiary PT Entertainment Services (PTES) committed serious social responsibility, anti-money laundering and VIP failings after concluding its investigation into the case of a customer who took his own life in 2017.
