Last October, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig upheld the ban on Internet gambling. The ban was right, the judges found, and compatible with constitutional and European law. But is it being enforced?
888 Holdings has announced that it may withdraw from the German market because of the “disappointing legal situation”.
Other providers did not even wait for the verdict: Both the Westphalian Gauselmann Group and the Austrian gaming group Novomatic do not want to get their hands dirty by selling their games to Internet operators who may then illegally collect money from German players.
Nevertheless, experts see this as a “paradise for illegal gambling providers,” because many federal states do not enforce existing prohibitions effectively.
The 460,000 people in Germany who have a problem related to gambling may well be amongst these sites’ customers. More than 200,000 are considered pathological gamblers who compulsively gamble all the money they can find. They are the most significant argument in favour of these strict prohibitions.
Full article: Süddeutsche Zeitung (German)
