Spanish market opening delayed
Licences will be awarded this Friday but dot.es sites will not go live until 5 June at the earliest.
The General Directorate for the Regulation of Gambling (DGOJ) has delayed the launch of licensed dot.es sites until 5 June, sources in Spain have confirmed to eGaming Review, however, the regulatory body is still expected to hand out licences as planned this Friday.
The DGOJ has reportedly decided to delay the opening of the market in order to give approved operators a five-day period in which they will be required to register a technical contact “ either a person or company “ with the regulator’s databases and systems.
A source close to the matter explained to eGR that the regulator is keen to ensure all operators are able to launch their dot.es sites simultaneously in order to make the opening as fair as possible: “The DGOJ want everyone to go online at the same time, and wants to ensure all operators are informed on whether their applications have been successful before the market opens.
“Each operator will be issued with a dossier of technical requirements and instructions when they are awarded a licence and will have a period to ensure they are compliant before the opening.” the source said.
However, while 5 June has been reported as the expected date for the opening of the market, eGR’s source added this could be further delayed as “a few [operators] are not going to be ready “ possibly for up to a month.”
The source added that such a delay would not be a surprise: “Spain will be different to [Schleswig-Holstein] where licences are being handed out to small numbers of operators at a time, so this was always a possibility.”
Despite the market being unlikely to open by the proposed 1 June deadline announced by DGOJ general director Enrique Alejo earlier this month, it will still open ahead of the original revised deadline of 30 June. This date was set after the original launch date was pushed back six months over concerns about the amount of paperwork the DGOJ was required to sift through in order to approve licence applications.
The delay is the latest move to ensure as fair a market as possible for all operators after the Spanish Tax Authority pursued a number of leading European operators over the payment of back-tax accrued from operations over the period from January 2009 to May 2011, after which companies started paying 25% gross profit tax (GPT).
Bwin.party became the first operator to settle, paying a total consideration of 33m last week. It was quickly followed by Sportingbet, which settled for 17.2m, while Betfair paid a sum “not more than 10m.”
888 announced that it had committed to an 8.7m payment yesterday, and Ladbrokes has paid an undisclosed, small settlement which it described as “not a material number when compared with bwin.party and Sportingbet,” leaving William Hill and Paddy Power as the only leading, publicly-listed operators yet to announce whether it will repay the back-tax. Private operator Bet365 is understood to have made a payment, while PokerStars has told eGR that it is in “continuing discussions” with the regulator. The amount so far generated by the back-tax payments is now to have exceeded 100m.
Despite providing applications and details of operators’ finances and operations in the market, Alejo told eGR in an exclusive interview that the back tax procedure was a “completely separate process” to the DGOJ, though the regulator could be forced to issue or deny licences based on the recommendations of the Tax Authority.