The joint-venture between William Hill and Codere has obtained a licence to operate betting shops in el País Vasco. Codere has announced that on October 31, 2007 its subsidiary, Garaipen Victoria Apustuak S.L., was awarded one of three licenses granted to offer sport betting in the Basque region of Spain (one of the other licences was awarded to a joint-venture between Betfred and the Basque company Ekasa). Garaipen Victoria Apustuak S.L is a company in which the Codere & William Hill joint venture has a 67% stake, and the remaining 33% is held by local Basque partners, including 27 local gaming operators. Garaipen Victoria Apustuak expects to invest a total of approximately €31.6 million and to create 205 jobs in the Basque region. Ladbrokes and Stan James failed to get a licence.
Italy's Lottomatica SpA was awarded a total of 1,644 new betting licences, comprising 1,144 sports betting rights and 500 horse racing betting rights. The company also won an online betting licence. Lottomatica's business model will be based around franchisees. Intralot won 426 new betting licences, whilst Betfair and Unibet won remote betting licences. When announcing results for the nine month period ended September 2007, Lottomatica said that sports betting wagers, with over 1,000 locations in operation, were approximately €26.7 million, for the months of August and September. Revenues from sports betting were approximately €5.2 million, equal to gross wagers net of prize payouts. The biggest overall winners were the incumbent operators Snai and Sisal, who together were awared 64% of the new licences.
Prior to the recent Swedish General Election, the leader of the victorious Moderate Party Fredrik Reinfeldt, stated that his party would consider getting rid of the current gambling monopoly and replacing it with a regulated betting market that allows private companies to apply for gaming licences. Following the election, Reinfeldt's coalition partners, the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Party expressed support for this view, with Sweden's new minister for financial markets Mats Odell telling Swedish Radio that the current situation was'pure wild west', and simply unsustainable. The smart money now says that it will not be that long before Ladbrokes is opening its first betting shop on Drottninggatan. On October 27 2007, Sweden's governing party, the Moderate Party voted at its annual conference in Gävle on Saturday to come out in favour of the liberalisation of the Swedish betting market; including the sale of Svenska Spel and ATG.
According to France's Minister for Budget and Public Accounts, Eric Woerth; the French government "is not hostile to the notion of opening up its sports betting markets to competition, provided that such an opening "is controlled." But, lest one should reach for the champagne, it should be noted that Woerth does not envisage some sort of free for all, with the likes of Ladbrokes, William Hill and Paddy Power opening up betting shops on the The Champs-Élysées, and setting up pitches at Longchamp, Auteuil, Chantilly, Deauville, Maisons-Laffitte and Saint-Cloud. No, what the French model actually envisages, is the opening up of the French betting market to online betting companies that are prepared to be licenced in France, and to be taxed on a comparable basis to the way in which the state monopolist PMU is currently taxed. Moreover it is unlikely that the French will allow either fixed odds betting on horse racing or betting exchanges to operate. Market liberalisation French style.
In October 2007 the Court of Utrecht ruled against online betting site Unibet, in a case brought by De Lotto. The Court ordered Unibet to stop taking bets from Dutch citizens, whilst also imposing a non-compliance penalty of €100,000 per day. On October 22 2007, Petter Nylander, the CEO of online gaming company Unibet, was detained by Dutch authorities after checking in to a flight to the UK. The background for his detention is the proceedings filed in 2006 by the French lottery monopoly Française des Jeux and horse betting monopoly PMU against Unibet, alleging breach of the French national laws from 1836 and 1891 protecting those State-owned monopolies. On 6 November 2007 the Administrative Court of Appeal for the German state of Hessen said that it had lifted a ban that had prevented BWIN Interactive Entertainment AG, from offering its online gambling services to German citizens. The court said that as it believed that such a ban would be impossible to implement, it was in effect null and void.