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In an interview with CalvinAyre.com, Corinne Valetta of the Malta Gaming Authority discusses Malta being at par with other gambling jurisdictions, EU directives and cryptocurrency in the gambling industry.
It’s a common example today that government turns to the gambling industry in order to increase the budget for social services. For example, Philippines. According to the State regulator Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation, a part of its gross gaming revenue will be used for government’s health programmes. Meanwhile, in the UK, the funds raised via the national lottery and tax were used for Olympic and Paralympic sports.
Corinne Valetta of the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) says that implementing operator-friendly policies is the key in order to support the growth of the gambling industry in any jurisdiction.
She commented so as Malta is currently undergoing a process of streamlining many regulations. According to Valetta, MGA is aware of the increasing compliance demands that operators are facing because of the state-by-state jurisdiction.
“We are aware that we have created a compliance nightmare for operators so we are doing quite a bit to tone this down, streamline it to make it more operator friendly. There are a number of initiatives going on throughout the European Union – if I could just mention a few – I think we have gained significant headway within the expert group on gambling services, which we basically discussed a number of issues which affects the industry,” Valetta said in an interview with CalvinAyre.com.
“We try, as much as possible, at par with other jurisdictions, to create a level playing field. It has been so difficult, you know, to comply with other jurisdictions, we are aware of that. We are trying to achieve the right balance,” Valetta added.
The second important issue pointed by Valetta is bracing for the possible effect of the money laundering directive issued by the European Union. According to Valetta, they are now working on the actual implementation of the directive.
“We have a nationwide national risk assessment, which looked at the very sectors – including the gaming industry but now we’ve also gone into the gaming industry per se, and it is open to products, services, scenarios, services controls and we conducted a risk analysis of each and every product, each of every scenario,” Valetta added.
Regarding the cryptocurrency, Valetta said that virtual currencies should be tackled not only by the MGA but also by other concerned Malta agencies.
“That has been something that we’ve been working for a long time. And we need obviously the financial services center on-board, they are the agency directly dealing with the virtual currencies, we need to have the financial intelligence analysis unit on-board especially considering that virtual currency are now included in the directive. We need to have all the stakeholders on-board and we’ve finally managed to get everybody around the table and we kick-started a project in order to announce more on this position,” Valetta commented.
