CHIPRE: Chipre Implementa lista negra do jogo online – Proibe 270 sites

21/02/2013 by admin in Chipre, Notícias, Operadores Online, Regulamentação No Comments

The government of Cyprus decided to take action against online gambling operators active in the country. From now on Cypriot ISPs will be forced to block citizens’ access to around 270 “illegal” online gambling websites.

Last year Cyprus adopted a new legislation that bans all forms of online gambling. However, until just now the country did not take any concrete steps to enforce this legislation. Now the government implemented a new measure that would force ISPs to ban all online casino sites supposedly active in the country.

The government already created a list of around 270 online casino, online betting and online poker websites. Access to these websites will have to be blocked by ISPs within 3 days from today. ISPs risk to be fined up to EUR 30,000 in case they refuse to comply with the order.

The blacklist in question also seems to contain domain names and operators that did actually cease offering online gaming services in Cyprus after the government decided to ban this practice. Such operators include Betfair, William Hill, bwin.party and more.

Betfair, for example, already ceased offering online gaming services to Cypriot players last year. At that time the company explained that leaving Cyprus would decrease the venture’s annual sports betting revenues with approximately 4%.

William Hill also announced a few months ago that it had shut down its Cyprus operations, however it’s still on the new blacklist. Based on this, it appears that Cyprus intends to ban all online casino sites regardless if they are active in the country or not.

However, due to a bilateral agreement between Cyprus and Greece, the Greek state-owned gambling company OPAP is allowed to unrestrictedly offer its services in the country. Based on this, many operators have accused Cyprus of banning online gambling in order to protect the business interests of OPAP.

These operators have also submitted an official complaint to the European Commission arguing that Cyprus is breaching EU cross border trade agreements and treaties. The affected operators – rightfully – claim that Cyprus should not be allowed to offer preferential treatment to a Greek state-owned company while discriminating companies from other member states.

Fonte: Online Casino Advice

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