by: InfoPowa
The mercenary interests of European state lotteries, and some questionable claims that online gambling fosters addiction were showcased this week in a Dow Jones report that quoted unnamed officials of the European Lotteries and Toto Association.
The report claimed without substantiating evidence or identifying any studies that online betting encourages gambling addictions and threatens to reduce state revenue drawn from state lotteries, according to the European Lotteries and Toto Association, in a study released Wednesday. The state lotteries are facing tough competition from online gaming companies and a campaign to break down their domination of the gambling market is apparently underway. Adding fuel to the competitive fire is the activity of European internal market and services commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, who has launched more than a dozen legal cases this month, charging France, Austria, Italy and others with failing to bring their gambling laws into compliance with "free cross-border services" in the European Union by protecting state-dominated gambling monopolies. The association, which represents state-owned lotteries in In 2004, for example, lotteries paid 33 percent of their revenue in taxes while taxes were only 3 percent of turnover of online gaming companies. Online gambling companies, many located in "There's (not an effective) tax system because these companies are on the Internet," said Winfried Wortmann, managing director of the Westdeutsche Lotterie GmbH. Many state lotteries have begun online sport-betting, but they impose limits on bettors, which adds a level of protection not offered by Internet companies, thus keeping gambling addiction in check, said Christophe Blanchard-Dignac, chairman and chief executive of betting company La Francaise de Jeux, a monopoly owned 72 percent by the French government. French law mandates that only Francaise des Jeux and the horse-betting firm PMU may solicit bets from customers in . Blanchard-Dignac said that his company limits credit-card bets to Euro 100 a week and those done by cheque to Euro 500 a week. Germany limits bets to Euro 250 a week. These limits protect addicted gamblers from themselves, the association said. "Every state has a right to its own gambling policy," Blanchard-Dignac added. The average per-person expenditure on gambling was Euro 630 in 2004, the report said. Total gambling revenue was around Euro 290 billion or about 2.8 percent of Europe-wide GDP, it said. Several major EU-domiciled betting groups are currently in various stages of litigation and EC dispute with diverse EU member states, and recently two top Austrian executives from the Bwin betting group were arrested and temporarily detained by French police, charged with breaking the French gambling monopoly law.
