Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming April 2016 40 Big Game Promoters “We will then help them prepare the required documentation. If it’s not all legal and correct the gaming regulator will throw it out.” In the eyes of the UK’s Gambling Commission, in fact, any gaming operator that sponsors British sport is advertising its products to UK citizens. To do so requires a UK gaming license. And to get one the operator will have to submit a full plan of business. Applying for a gaming license is always a convoluted process. In the UK, the regulator will want to know all about the owners of the Asian iGaming operator; the source of Why would an Asian bookmaker wishing to sponsor a football club in England have to convince the authorities there it is not facilitating terrorism? Steven Ribet talks to Equiom’s Head of eBusiness Peter Greenhill I f there’s one thing Asians are more passionate about than gambling it’s English Premier League Football. Punters from Jakarta to Seoul wager huge sums on UK matches. So the best place for an Asian online bookmaker to advertise is, you’ve guessed it, on the team shirt of an English Premier League club, or the hoardings surrounding its football pitch. The Makati City-based operator dafabet, for example, is the Main Club Sponsor of Sunderland FC, and the Official International Gaming and Betting Partner of Everton FC. Given the high value of such agreements you might think the process of completing them would be simple, expedited by a UK government eager for much-needed export earnings. Far from it. Peter Greenhill advises Asian iGaming outfits on such deals for the tax and licensing consultancy Equiom. As he explains, getting that much-prized ad will require them to go through the knotty process of setting up a full blown business in Britain, often with its headquarters on the Isle of Man. “Companies come to us with a concept about what they want to do,” says Greenhill. their wealth and its history of operations. They will conduct a full investigation into its gaming software, which has to be certified as not crooked. They will need to know its customers are fully protected. That’s where the offshore jurisdiction of the Isle of Man comes in. The self-governing Crown dependency has some of the world’s most rigorous online gaming regulations. It requires complete segregation of gamblers’ funds from an operator’s business expenses. This goes further than the mainland UK, which trusts iGaming in Depth iGaming Blue Pages