Gambling Commission (GC) Executive Director Tim Miller has highlighted the ways in which the regulator is collaborating with other watchdog agencies globally to clamp down on bad actors.
Speaking in the opening hour of this year’s ICE Vox World Regulatory Briefing on Monday, Miller said the GC was taking “a joined-up international approach” to identify sites operating illegally in the UK, even when their activities are legal elsewhere.
“Some jurisdictions don’t yet regulate online gambling at all and most regulators are largely focused on what operators do in their own jurisdictions. Let’s also remember that the legitimate licenced operators in one jurisdiction can actually be illegal or black market in another”, he said.
“No one gambling regulator can be the world police on this, taking gambling companies to task for everything they do in any part of the world. We’re not resourced to work like that, we don’t have the powers to do that, and it’s not what we were set up to do.
“But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore what an operator licenced or based in our jurisdiction is doing elsewhere. Especially if that calls into question their suitability to hold a licence here in Britain.”
Miller said that where the GC had established strong working relationships with other regulators, it was increasingly seeing bad practice and bad behaviour of some operators being shared and discussed.
He said the regulator had worked in recent years with a number of jurisdictions with newly established online gambling regimes, such as the Netherlands, Germany, and various U.S. states. The GC has also been in discussion with the Irish government as they seek to establish their own gambling regulator.
“This week, amongst other meetings that are in place, we will be meeting delegations from Curaçao and seeing how they’re looking to reform and update their regulation regime”, he added.
Curaçao is in the process of strengthening its regulatory oversight of the industry with the establishment of the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA).
Concluding his speech with a nod to the forthcoming gambling-reform White Paper, on which the GC has been collaborating with the UK’s Department for Media, Culture and Sport, Miller said, “Whatever a given jurisdiction’s model of regulation, from prohibition to liberalisation, gambling is clearly global. So if gambling regulators are to keep on making gambling safer, fairer, and crime free, we need to go global as well.”
