Regulatory
Licensing, compliance, and regulator activity worldwide.
Law 86-26 is in the Gaceta Oficial and the new regulator has an interim chief, but the decade-long licence freeze has not started. It begins only when a register of existing operators is published, more than a year from now, and the months before then decide who is inside it.
A law in force since 1 October ends the Supervisory Authority for Regulated Activities' veto over concession contracts, including casino concessions, and abolishes the Concession Council it dominated. The regulator must pass its concession files to the finance minister by the end of the month, as the government weighs whether to close it altogether.
The first month to reflect the higher rate brought in 108% more online gaming duty than a year earlier, more than the rate rise alone explains. The industry says one month proves nothing; the Treasury, three weeks from a Budget that may double Machine Games Duty, may read it differently.
The Upper Tribunal has ruled that free spins won on a free promotional game fall outside Remote Gaming Duty, reversing the First-tier Tribunal and wiping out the assessment against the Super Group subsidiary. With the duty now at 40%, the ruling reaches well beyond one operator, unless HMRC appeals or Parliament changes the law.
Police say a money trail from a boxing betting network worth more than 1 billion baht leads to Atchariya Ruangrattanapong, a campaigner who has spent years accusing officers of taking money from gambling. He denies all four charges and says the case is fabricated.
Immigration officers, the National Bureau of Investigation and the army raided two sites in Zamboanga Sibugay on 2 October and found some 3,000 mobile phones. The Bureau of Immigration calls it this year's biggest offshore gaming bust, which says as much about the ban as about the raid.
Both houses of Parliament have unanimously approved an order that removes the offence of running remote gambling from Trinidad and Tobago. The licensing regime it depends on has sat unproclaimed since 2021, and the Attorney General has now promised it by New Year's Day.
Three Central Bank resolutions write the betting ban into the rulebooks of Brazil's main payment rails, and a Finance Ministry ordinance gives operators until Wednesday to hand over every player's balance. The tool for clawing back Pix payments to illegal sites still does not exist, and the government page licensed sites are told to point to was not live on Monday morning.
The government's lawyer has told the Supreme Federal Tribunal that the laws which created Brazil's licensed betting market are unconstitutional, reversing the position it took in 2024. It did so in a different case from the one in which Justice Luiz Fux gave it 72 hours, and operators, clubs and Flamengo want his answer on the ban before licensed sites go dark at midnight.
Costa Rica's Ministry of Finance says every casino it inspected in late September sold gaming chips without issuing electronic receipts, and some declared zero profit or zero VAT. The sanctions, worth about $780,000, test a casino tax regime built on counting tables in a country that still has no licensing framework for online gambling.
The Supreme Court's betting rapporteur now holds every action against Provisional Measure 1.394, and has asked the Attorney General's Office to respond before he decides anything. Its deadline lands as licensed sites go dark, while Congress has pushed its own amendments past the election.
The Kansspelautoriteit says an impostor got a lottery licence in the name of a Katwijk football club and used it to sell tickets on eight websites. The regulator calls it a new risk, and it has tightened the checks behind the licence register it tells consumers to trust.