Belgium could award more licences in H1
First wave of licences to be made official in February at which point blacklist will be drawn up.
The Belgian Gaming Commission has left the door open for foreign egaming operators to enter the EU country’s newly regulated market in the first half of this year but only if they are “Willing to respect legislation.”
Earlier this month the Commission named the first nine licensees to enter the dot.be market, although at present the ‘licences’ only amount to authorisations from the chairman of the regulatory authority. However Peter Naessens, head of the regulatory unit at the BGC, told eGaming Review that “We want to strengthen the legal basis by transforming these authorisations into full licences.”
He added that the planned blacklist, designed to end relationships between unlicensed operators and financial institutions, would be drawn up as soon as the licences were made official.
“We have interest from others and have major European operators who have shown interest in operating there, so we are seeing what we can do,” added Naessens.
“It’s difficult to say what will happen at the moment but we will look at each demand separately and if an operator is willing to respect legislation then there won’t be any problem,” he explained.
Among the likely new applicants is Unibet, with the Swedish operator believed to be intent on supplementing its newly-activated French licences.
Naessens said: “Unibet has asked for a land-based betting licence as a starting point “ we will discuss this in the coming months and if and when they get that they can go for an online licence. If they have a licence they can begin operating immediately, and I expect if they are successful then the online gambling licence would be awarded in the first half of 2012.” eGR is awaiting comment from Unibet on the matter.
When plans for a blacklist were first announced, lobby groups including the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) “ as well as some operators “ queried the Belgian regulatory framework on the grounds that they did not consider it to be compatible with European Union legislation. However Naessens told eGR: “For us the discussion concerning EU compatibility is completely over as our constitutional court has said there’s no problem with European law, and it’s fully compatible.
“We’re fully confident that we’re compliant, and we’re confident that we can defend our policy. We’re working with operators from various countries, so if they say we’re ring-fencing the market, I do not think they are right. All we have done is ask for a certain level of control with regards to servers,” he added.