The situation with the taxation of gambling market organisers has been viewed extremely biased since the return of gambling to the legal field in the second half of 2020. Almost everyone who was concerned with taxation, including members of the Parliamentary Committee on Finance, Taxation and Customs Policy, members of various parliamentary investigative and selective committees that were "looking for money" to fill the state budget, officials of the Ministry of Finance, media representatives, etc. always paid attention only to the activities of licensed gambling organisers and ignored the work of lottery operators.
At the same time, lottery operators, using the "peculiarities" of domestic legislation that does not consider the organisation of lotteries to be a gambling-related activity, have been actively using this and imitating almost all types of gambling: from casinos and slot machines to bookmaking. All of this is implemented mainly online, where you can find any gambling game and play it on lottery websites.
And this rather strange situation, in my opinion, in a civilised country, was not even paid attention to by domestic law enforcement until recently! Who else but them would have done it? But positive changes are gradually taking place. Thus, at the end of August, detectives of the Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine, based on the materials of criminal proceedings, in particular, information from CRGL, initiated a request to the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine and the National Centre for Operational and Technical Management of Telecommunications Networks to block access to two lottery operators' websites.
This proceeding builds on previous BES investigations that have exposed the illegal activities of several officials in the field of gambling by several officials of well-known state lottery operators. The suspects, using their official status, engaged controlled companies and organised online gambling and betting activities disguised as state lotteries on the basis of their websites of legal Ukrainian lottery operators.
If it were not for the BES, many people would probably keep silent about the illegal gambling activities of lottery operators! Often, such "activities" go unnoticed due to a lack of control or insufficient public awareness. It is only the extraordinary activity of law enforcement that forces the media and politicians to pay attention to the work of illegal operators.
In addition to publicity and drawing attention to problematic issues in the activities of domestic lottery operators, there is another undoubted positive, namely, the requirement to include in the agenda of MPs the need to adopt amendments to the current legislation that would return lotteries to the field of gambling. Well, if lottery operators are so eager to provide gambling services, they should create all the legislative grounds for this and recognise lotteries as gambling.
It will be fair, adequate and fully in line with the current international experience and practice of civilised countries. Moreover, the state budget will benefit from such regulation of lottery business activities.
Comentários