E-GAMBLING COULD BE GOOD BUSINESS FOR POLAND

28 November 2008

Casinos Poland director says there could be useful synergy with land operations

 

Zbigniew Macioszek, a member of the board of Casinos Poland, gave an interesting interview this week to the Warsaw Business Journal, in which he commented on the state of e-gambling in the European Union and opined that there may be good opportunities for Poland in the jurisdictional milieu.

Apparently disregarding the UK Gambling Commission, Maciosek said: "The only state that made [online gambling websites] legal is Malta, but the regulations are so heavy that if any other country were to legalise the industry, it would attract investors immediately.

"I cannot see any reason why Poland should not do it," the casino executive said, adding that the legalisation and development of online gambling could create a great deal of synergy with traditional casinos.

The WSJ reports that the popularity of online gambling is growing rapidly in Poland, giving as an example the e-gambling site Bet-at-home.com, which has tripled its Polish client base to 450 000 within the last two years, according to the newspaper Dziennik. Every fifth player on the site comes from Poland according to Bet-at-home's data.

Macioszek opines that a new legal framework for gambling is needed in Poland. "[The current framework] was created almost 20 years ago from scratch, with a lot of regulations copied from other countries. Thus, a number of regulations are obsolete or inapplicable in the current context," Macioszek said.

"There is no one system that we could follow, since every country is different. There are, however, solutions that are worth noting," he said. "In Poland,we fall under the government's Customs department, which does not have much time to focus on the sector and does not understand it," he said.