Italy: all our coverage

Prosecutors at the Corte dei conti allege that five former staff of the scratchcard concessionaire used their system access to find four winning tickets worth €24 million and had relatives and friends buy them. The claim is the State's, not the company's: prizes that chance might have left unclaimed would have stayed with the Treasury.

Italy's communications regulator wants an operator's ".news" or ".sport" brand to escape the gambling advertising ban only if it runs a real newsroom, links nowhere near the betting site and looks nothing like it. The draft lands two days after the Constitutional Court made the ban's €50,000 minimum fine reducible.

The Economy Ministry has told MPs that raising the levy on AWP slot machines from 24% to 26% risks shrinking play enough to lose money, killing an opposition plan to fund carers from it. The same ministry is reported to be looking for up to €1 billion from gambling in the 2027 Budget.

The boards have signed the common merger plan that fixes the terms first announced in September: 0.668 Lottomatica shares per CIRSA share, a €262m CIRSA dividend before completion and a €744m capital return after it. With Blackstone committed, the votes are close to a formality. The regulators are not.

The Council of State has upheld the €100 weekly cash cap at Italy's top-up shops and struck down a ban on internet-connected devices there, while the decree meant to reorganise betting shops, gaming halls and machines lapsed in August. Rulings, not legislation, are now setting the rules for retail.

Stake Canada Ltd. is now on the regulator's register and says it expects to be fully operational on 12 October, provided it signs an operating agreement with the Alberta iGaming Corporation. The date sits one day inside the 13 October limit for operators moving out of Alberta's grey market.

Polymarket has confirmed it is challenging the Dutch gambling regulator's order in court, after being charged for blocking Dutch users a day late. Its case is that event contracts belong with the financial markets supervisor, an argument that, if it won, could land it under the Netherlands' indefinite ban on selling binary options to retail clients.

The Ministry of Finance has listed kalshi.com as a site offering prohibited gambling, and internet providers must block it by 15 October. The order covers the website only, but it puts the largest US prediction market on the same footing in Czechia as an unlicensed online casino.

Betsson Group has set up the Betsson Foundation to coordinate its community and sports giving. It has published a governance outline and one project in Peru, but no funding commitment, no board and no spending figures to judge it by.

The Ministry of Culture and Equality has put online poker for the state monopoly out to a fast-track consultation, two years after Norsk Tipping asked for it. The proposal comes with tight stakes, loss and table limits, and an open question about whether a Norway-only player pool can compete with the foreign sites it is meant to replace.

Prime Minister Rumen Radev said on Wednesday that draft amendments to the Gambling Act would leave sports sponsorship as the only permitted form of gambling advertising, raise the levy on online gambling substantially and connect every gaming machine to the tax authority in real time. The texts go to public consultation first.

Caesars Entertainment shareholders approved Fertitta Entertainment's $31-a-share takeover at a special meeting in Reno on Tuesday, with votes in favour equal to about 65.4% of outstanding shares, the company confirmed in a filing on Wednesday. The deal now depends on a Federal Trade Commission second request and gaming regulators in every Caesars state, while a disclosure shows the President's managers sold a small Caesars holding in July.

The exchange has been meeting regulators in the UK and the EU to argue that its contracts belong to financial supervisors rather than gambling ones, the Financial Times reports, after being blocked in Italy, the Netherlands and France. Britain's Gambling Commission says a prediction market launching here could not classify itself as non-gambling.

With the reorganisation of betting shops, gaming halls and machines abandoned in August, the Ministry of Economy and Finance is looking at extending the licences that expire in December to the end of 2029 and collecting the fees, according to reports on the 2027 Budget. A €1 billion scratch-card tender is also in the mix.

From 14 September every gambling advertiser must show a clean compliance record, manager accounts with repeated revocations are barred, and free subdomains and unrelated domains are ineligible. Croatia is cut off entirely from 7 October.

The EU securities regulator's risk report finds the biggest platforms hold no EU authorisation, that binary-option rules bar retail sale where contracts are derivatives, and that platform surveillance arrives only after the profits are banked.

A binding merger agreement signed in Rome and Barcelona creates the second-largest listed gaming and sports betting operator in the world, on about €2 billion of pro forma EBITDA. Cirsa is valued at roughly 6x.

Parliament cleared the package on 19 August. Wagering ads disappear from live sport, from stadiums and from players' shirts, athletes and influencers can no longer promote betting, and a single national register will let Australians switch the advertising off everywhere at once. It commences on 1 January 2027.

Kalshi, Polymarket and Robinhood's new Rothera venue combined for more than $50 billion in trading volume in June, dwarfing the handle traditional US sportsbooks are projected to take across the entire World Cup. The tournament has become the clearest evidence yet that event contracts are competing with regulated betting, not sitting beside it.

Italy's customs and monopolies regulator has ordered internet providers to make Polymarket and hundreds of other sites unreachable, reasserting that a prediction market operating without an Italian concession is simply an unlicensed gambling operator. It is Polymarket's second Italian blackout in nine months.

Four years after 888 Holdings, now Evoke, agreed to pay £2.2 billion for William Hill's international assets, the company has agreed an all-share takeover by Bally's Intralot worth about £243.1 million (€281 million). A November 2025 Budget tax shock forced the board's hand.

Brussels has shared early estimates suggesting new EU-level taxes on online gambling, big tech and crypto could raise close to €11 billion a year for the 2028 to 2034 budget. A 3% levy on gambling net turnover could yield around €1.9 billion annually, though the figures are analytical options, not law, and any bloc-wide tax needs unanimous Member State approval.

The most consequential US gambling story of the year has just unfolded inside one company. Amy Howe is out at FanDuel, the sportsbook is bleeding customers and Flutter is betting nine figures on prediction markets to fix it.

A cross-party group of UK lawmakers says current gambling advertising rules have failed children and vulnerable people. With the industry spending up to £2 billion a year on promotion, they want sweeping restrictions and they want them now.