Regulatory
Licensing, compliance, and regulator activity worldwide.
Takeharu Yamanaka won in 2021 on a platform of killing the city's integrated resort bid, and did. He has now stepped down over a workplace harassment finding, weeks before a special election, in a country whose prime minister supports a second round of casino licensing and whose tourism agency will take applications from May 2027.
Anthony Lee, the Conservative Party's director of campaigning at the time, admitted two offences under section 42 of the Gambling Act over a bet on the 2024 general election date. His wife Laura Lee admitted one. Sentencing is on 23 October, and the maximum is two years.
The International Alliance Combating Telecom and Cyber Fraud was formally launched on 10 September, with the United Nations and Interpol represented as observers. Its initiating countries include Cambodia, whose regulator has spent the past year revoking casino licences over links to exactly the scam operations the alliance exists to disrupt.
Sources close to Lula say a provisional measure restricting the regulated betting market could reach the National Congress this week, with an online casino ban among the options. The regulator wants the effort aimed at clandestine platforms instead, and a separate bill would cap a bettor at R$100 a day across every licensed site.
The Financial Action Task Force has spent a year on gambling, with input from more than 80 jurisdictions, and its report reads as a supervisory checklist rather than a warning. The finding operators will least enjoy is that online platforms show more documented terrorist-financing misuse than the land-based sector.
Downing Street says adult gaming centres are spreading across the high street and wants councils able to refuse them. The trade body's reply is that Gambling Commission data shows 1,610 AGCs in 2015 and 1,415 in 2025. Its own member survey, taken before the change of prime minister, found 100% believe Westminster does not understand the sector.
PowNed's new PowCrime platform showed people registered on the national self-exclusion register getting into gaming halls on somebody else's identity document. The regulator calls it a serious signal and is acting against the venues named, and it has conceded the point that matters: land-based access control is a manual process.
The regulator has seen gambling activity spike around the days minimum-income payments land, and has been asking since 2023 how to check whether a casino-card applicant is a benefit recipient. The answer on the table is a yes-or-no lookup against an ID number. The Data Protection Commissioner's alternative, a card that marks the holder out, drew warnings about stigma.
Euromat puts Europe's illegal online market at €12 billion and says it has tripled since 2019. The Betting and Gaming Council promotes a separate report putting the global figure at $50 billion. The two numbers cannot be compared, both were commissioned by interested parties, and both reach the same conclusion about what enforcement is doing wrong.
Chancellor John Healey is said to be weighing an increase to the duty on gaming machines, a year after remote gaming duty went from 21% to 40%. A doubling would take the three bands to 10%, 40% and 50%, and analysts have told the Racing Post it would cost nearly 3,000 betting shops and around £70m of the racing levy.
The government has given the Gambling Commission a permanent chair after an interim stretch the trade press puts at 20 months. Ruth Evans arrives from Stop Scams UK, the body that persuaded banks, telecoms firms and technology platforms to sit at the same table, and her first sentence on the job named the technology sector.
Four Northern Territory-licensed businesses sell Australians entries into US Powerball and EuroMillions draws. From 1 January 2027 they cannot, and online keno goes with them. The Lottery Corporation, which backs the change, has put the cost of losing its own online keno business at A$25 million of annual earnings.