Belgium's Council of State Suspends the €750m Brussels Casino Award

The City of Brussels gave its 15-year casino concession to Napoleon Games by 91.02 points to 87.74. The administrative court has now suspended that decision, and one of its grounds is a European filing the city never made.

• Belgium's Council of State suspended the City of Brussels' decision to award the capital's casino concession to ECK NV, the operating entity behind Napoleon Games, on 31 August
• The concession, awarded on 17 July, runs for 15 years from 1 January 2027 and has an estimated value of €750 million
• The challenge was brought by Viage, the incumbent operator since 2010 and a venture of Casinos Austria International, which lost the tender by 91.02 points to 87.74
• The court's auditor general questioned the scoring, citing a lack of breakdown between certain sub-criteria, several undated letters in the winning application, and insufficient detail for bidders to understand how scores were reached
• He also found the city had not met European foreign-subsidies notification obligations, because the €750 million concession exceeds the €250 million threshold that triggers a filing to the European Commission

A 3.28-Point Margin Is Now Being Examined in Court

On 17 July 2026 the City of Brussels awarded the concession to operate the capital's casino to ECK NV, the entity behind the Napoleon Games brand, which is part of the Romanian-founded Superbet group. The concession runs for 15 years from 1 January 2027 and carries an estimated value of €750 million.

The losing bidder was the incumbent. Viage, a venture of Casinos Austria International, has run the Grand Casino Brussels since 2010. It was beaten on the scoring by 91.02 points to 87.74, a margin of 3.28 points, and it took the decision to the Council of State, Belgium's supreme administrative court.

On 31 August the court suspended the award. A suspension is not a final annulment and it does not hand the concession to anyone else. Its effect is to stop the awarded decision proceeding while the legal and administrative consequences are worked through, which leaves Viage operating the casino and the planned 1 January 2027 change of operator in doubt.

The grounds set out by the court's auditor general go to how the bids were marked rather than to who should have won. He pointed to a lack of breakdown between certain sub-criteria, meaning bidders could not see how a composite score had been assembled. He noted that Napoleon's application contained several undated letters. And he found that candidates had not been given sufficiently detailed information to understand how their scores were calculated.

One criterion carries particular weight given the narrow overall margin. On "vision for the casino's future", Napoleon Games received 30 points and Viage 20. That single 10-point gap is larger than the 3.28 points that separated the two bids overall, which means the contested criterion is arithmetically decisive.

The auditor general raised a separate issue that has nothing to do with the marking. The European Union's Foreign Subsidies Regulation requires contracting authorities to notify the European Commission of concessions above €250 million. At an estimated €750 million, the Brussels concession is three times that threshold, and the auditor found the city had not met the obligation.

The City of Brussels must now assess the court's findings and decide what is required before the procurement can move forward. No timetable has been set for a final ruling.

The Foreign-Subsidies Point Is the One With Reach Beyond Brussels

The scoring complaints are serious but local: a city that did not show its working, on a tender decided by three points. The Foreign Subsidies Regulation finding is different in kind, because it is a European obligation that applies to every large concession award across the bloc and has been in force since 2023 without generating much case law in this sector. Gambling concessions are exactly the kind of high-value, long-duration award the regulation was written for, and they are frequently contested by bidders with parent companies outside the EU. If a €750 million casino concession can be suspended in part because the notification was not made, then every national lottery licence, every casino concession and every large sports-betting tender now carries an additional procedural failure point that has nothing to do with the merits of the bids. Procurement teams across European gambling should be checking that box before their next award, not after a competitor raises it.

An Incumbent With Nothing Left to Lose Is a Dangerous Opponent

Viage's position when it filed was terminal: it had lost, it was due to hand over on 1 January 2027, and its only route to anything was the court. That is precisely the litigant a contracting authority should fear, because the cost of appealing is trivial against the value of a 15-year concession and there is no commercial relationship left to preserve. The suspension does not mean Viage wins. It means the city must either cure the defects and re-run the assessment, in which case Napoleon may well win again on a properly reasoned score, or start over. Either path consumes months the timetable does not have, and the practical consequence of a suspension in September is that a 1 January handover looks difficult regardless of how the substantive question is eventually resolved. The incumbent has bought time it could not otherwise have bought.

Napoleon Has Won Nothing Yet, and the Cost of the Delay Is Real

For Superbet's Belgian arm this is an expensive kind of limbo. It has a 15-year concession that is suspended, an opening date it cannot plan around, and a finding on the record that its application contained undated letters and that its partnerships were assessed on an apparently inaccurate basis. None of that is a finding of wrongdoing, and the criticisms land on the city's process rather than on the bidder. But an operator preparing to take over a capital-city casino has hiring, licensing and capital commitments that do not pause neatly, and the group is absorbing that while its Romanian home market runs its own municipal closures.

Brussels has to explain a three-point decision it did not adequately document. The wider lesson is that in European gambling procurement, the paperwork now includes a filing in Brussels of a different kind.