European Parliament calls for ban on live sports betting

This article was produced by Olswang LLP, which joined with CMS on 1 May 2017.

Every few years the European Parliament has looked at online gambling. So, in 2009 there was a report prepared by the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection chaired by Danish MEP, Christel Schaldemose, and then in 2011 there was a further report prepared by the same committee, this time chaired by German MEP Jurgen Creutzmann (see our note here here) and now the same committee has reported again, this time chaired by Ashley Fox who is the MEP for Gibraltar and the South West of England. The committee's report (see ), has yet to be voted on by the Parliament but it would be unusual for such a report not to be approved.

Reading the Report, one can see how Ashley Fox has tried to accommodate the range of different views and interests with, in some cases, contradictory opinions being expressed. Nevertheless, some consistent themes emerge, including the following:

• The threat which online gambling poses to vulnerable consumers and the need to introduce measures to protect against this but also to conduct further research better to understand the nature of gambling addiction;
• In the same vein, a call for common minimum standards with regard to advertising of online gambling and asking the European Commission to study "what can be done to stop the practice whereby companies based in one Member State market online-gambling services - for example via satellite TV or advertisement campaigns - in another Member State in which they are not licensed to offer such services";
• Whilst recognising that Member States have the right to determine their own online gambling regulation, pointing out that national regulation must be compliant with EU Treaty principles and calling upon the Commission to continue to monitor and enforce compliance of national laws with the EU Treaty and case law;
• Albeit that neither the provision of gambling services nor taxation in general is the subject of EU harmonisation, the Committee calls on the European Commission and the Member States and the expert group on gambling services (active since January 2013 the expert group is composed of representatives of all 27 Member States and has a remit of, inter alia, establishing cooperation between Member States' authorities and the Commission on matters relating to gambling services) to address "the problem of tax avoidance by authorised operators who provide online gambling services on the EU market but have their registered offices in tax havens within or outside the EU" and "believes that steps should be taken to bring national tax regimes for gambling services into line with one other in order to prevent disproportionate tax concessions from fostering a proliferation and concentration of online gambling services";
• Whilst the Committee notes that much of the online betting related to match fixing occurs through gambling operators established in unregulated markets outside the EU, calls for various codes of conduct to prevent corruption in sport;
• In particular, the Committee calls on sports federations and gambling operators "to include, in a code of conduct, a ban on betting on so-called negative events, such as yellow cards, penalty kicks or free kicks during a match or event" and calls on Member States and gambling operators "to ban all forms of live sports betting since these have proved to be very vulnerable to match fixing and therefore pose a risk to the integrity of sport";
• The Committee reaffirms its view that sports betting is a form of commercial use of sporting competitions and states that sporting competitions "should be protected from any unauthorised commercial use, notably by recognising the property rights of sports events organisers".

While the report's recommendations are intended to influence EU gambling policy, they have no binding effect in themselves. So far, there has been relatively little industry reaction to the report and Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner responsible for the internal market and services, has not commented on it. However, we would expect that while certain aspects will be widely welcomed, in particular encouraging greater cooperation between Member States, others, such as the call for a ban on live sports betting, will prove far more controversial.