ARJEL and DGOJ premiers formalise agreement
Jean-François Vilotte and Enrique Alejo confirm cooperation agreement does not cover shared poker liquidity.
ARJEL president Jean-François Vilotte and Spanish director of gambling Enrique Alejo have confirmed that the French and Spanish regulatory bodies have finalised a cooperation agreement.
The deal, first reported by eGaming Review last month, is similar in scope to ARJEL’s bilateral agreements with Italian regulator AAMS and the UK Gambling Commission and will cover the sharing of information and what ARJEL defines in a statement as “Comparisons to increase the effectiveness of the regulation including the exchange of information and alerts.”
However Villotte and Alejo confirmed that, in its current format, the agreement will not bring about the pooling of poker liquidity, with Vilotte explaining, “These agreements between regulators allow networking without abandoning standards and high standards of regulation”.
Pooled liquidity for certain products was a potential eventuality discussed by ARJEL, AAMS, Spain’s DGOJ and Portuguese regulator Santa Casa da Misericordia de Lisboa at a meeting of the four European regulators in July this year.
While a number of Spanish operators were not ready to go live when the market opened in June, the country’s poker market appears to be performing reasonably well in its early stages. In contrast, the French market has shrunk considerably in recent months with Winga and Poker Leaders the latest operators to relinquish their online poker licences, while gross gaming revenue from the Italian poker market is at its lowest ebb since the jurisdiction opened up the market for cash games.