The UK gambling regulatory body shared that anti-money laundering and social responsibility remain the two biggest weaknesses for the country’s gambling sector. This was made clear by Andrew Rhodes, the Chief Executive Officer of the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) that has just published its Compliance and Enforcement Report for the 2020/2021 financial year.
The Report provides more detailed information about the extensive casework of the UK gambling watchdog against local licence holders and the flaws in their policies, detailing where the gambling sector needs to raise the current standards.
In the aforementioned period – the 2020/2021 financial year – the UKGC found some breaches of compliance requirements which led to the suspension of five gambling companies’ licences and the licence revocation for one gambling company and nine holders of personal management permits. The gambling watchdog also revealed that 15 gambling businesses paid a total of £32.1 million as a result of regulatory settlements or monetary penalties, with the amount being larger than the one registered the year before.
CEO Rhodes shared that the Commission has been doing an enormous amount of enforcement work, which is great, but it is also really disappointing that so much enforcement action should be necessary across the country’s gambling industry. As mentioned above, the UKGC pointed out gambling businesses’ failures to comply with social responsibility and anti-money laundering rules remain the two main weaknesses in almost every occurrence of regulatory enforcement action in the 2020/2021 financial year.
Customer Protection and Keeping Gambling Industry Crime-Free among the Paramount Objectives of the Sector
The UKGC’s gambling regulator has explained that it has two major objectives – making sure that the country’s gambling sector is free of crime and protecting local customers from the possible gambling-related harm that could be inflicted on them. In fact, these two tasks are part of the three licensing objectives that need to be observed in order for a company to get an operating permit under the provisions of the Gambling Act 2005.
The boss of the major UK gambling regulatory body explained that all companies that are willing to keep their operating licences and be allowed to continue offering their services to local customers should make sure they put the aforementioned objectives at the forefront of their minds.
According to Mr Rhodes, the reasons that lead to the gambling companies’ failures to comply with the legislative and regulatory rules are just as serious as the failings themselves. It seems that gambling businesses either do not care about making suitable resources available or are simply giving their favour to commercial objectives rather than regulatory ones.
Mr Rhodes realises that a lot of gambling companies had faced a challenging 18-month period due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has made the future of some businesses unclear. He knows that the circumstances had forced such operators to make hard decisions in order to keep their heads above water at a time when the UK gambling sector had been struggling because of largely resumed operations. Still, the boss of the UKGC explained that difficulties related to Covid-19 cannot be used as a justification for regulatory breaches of operators and encouraged the industry, saying it had the knowledge, skills and resources to change that.
- Author
Daniel Williams
