"Costly and complicated" Dutch regulation must change
Lawyer leading legal challenge says current regulation must be amended and raises fears of its potential collapse
The Dutch gambling Bill is too costly and complicated for operators and must be amended if it is to succeed, according to the lawyer charged by land-based operators to lead the legal fight against it.
Speaking to eGaming Review this morning, Bas Jongmans, attorney at Gaming Legal, said that in its current form the regulation would prohibit most domestic operators from turning a profit due to the prospective tax obligations and responsible gambling measures.
“We have to do something to protect the operators who already have land-based casinos,” Jongmans said. “We analysed the online legislation and feel the obligations that are to be required are simply too expensive.”
The country’s decision to implement a split tax rate, with online operators paying 20% and land-based subject to a 29% tax, has proven to be contentious and Jongmans accused the country’s regulators of treating operators unequally.
“Maybe it will be a high tax rate, but let’s not differentiate between land-based and offline,” he said. “It’s very curious.”
Jongmans also raised doubts about the future of the draft Bill given previous occasions when legislation has failed, such as in 2008 when the Dutch senate blocked attempts to regulate online gambling at the last minute.
“Our biggest fear is that they’ll actually give up on the legislation before it comes into force, as the last thing we want is more delay and the Dutch operators need to offer online gaming now,” he said.
“This simply cannot take another four or five years and, without further delays, we estimate that the first online licences will not be awarded any time before summer 2016.”
Accusing the draft Bill of being “costly and complicated”, Jongmans said several facets of the Bill are hypocritical and contravene other elements of Dutch law, particularly in relation to customer privacy and data protection.
Player protection measures currently call for online gambling accounts to be linked to a person’s social security number, however current Dutch law prohibits any company from requesting and using a person’s social security number for means of identification.
“There are much easier ways to adopt these measures, look at Denmark for example, which is also much cheaper,” Jongmans said. “This whole system of registration is going to cost approximately 58m to introduce and regulate which, in my personal view, is completely insane.”
Jongmans, who yesterday confirmed a legal challenge to the bill, has called for the regulatory authorities in the country to meet and make amendments to the Bill in order to “eliminate the red tape of useless regulation”, otherwise domestic operators will risk missing out and face potential bankruptcy.
“We’re not trying to eliminate the whole legislation, we simply want to bring some incentive for the regulators to make it worth the investment, and have a reasonable return on that investment,” he added.