Industry News
U.K. Policy Proposal to Encourage Online Gambling
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown -- his country's secretary of the treasury --is poised to reveal a plan in his budget next month to encourage the online gambling industry, according to experts.
Brown will use the government's March 21 budget to announce that companies can obtain a U.K. license and "still remain based overseas" in return for a tax possibly as low as two per cent or three per cent, experts told Onlinecasinocrawler.com.
Designated as a "Remote Gaming Duty," the new tax will enable gambling companies to avoid paying U.K. value added tax (VAT), experts said.
Internet gaming groups will be able to relocate to the U.K. and obtain a license in September under the Gambling Act, experts said. However, such companies have said they would decline the chance if it meant paying a tax on gross wins.
The U.K. has been aggressively wooing online gaming companies, especially since the U.S. last fall moved to prohibit American citizens from wagering and clearing their online transactions through American banks and credit cards.
Recently, U.K. government officials held a "gaming summit" in the countryside, where they met with company executives and government officials from around the world to discuss plans to make the United Kingdom more gaming friendly. Many leading online gaming sites are located in the U.K. already, or have been traded on the London Stock Exchange.
Online gaming in the U.K. leads the way in Europe in terms of overall revenues, but France and Germany are not too far behind. Online gaming is also legal in Gibraltar, an island in the Mediterranean Sea which is controlled by the U.K. too.
A private group that serves as a de facto gaming authority for online gaming, eCogra, is based in London, and draws upon British experts in accounting and finance to police Internet sites and resolve disputes with unhappy gamers.
Most political observers believe that Brown may be the next Prime Minister of the U.K. when Tony Blair steps down, perhaps as early as later this year, after a decade in office, rivaling Margaret Thatcher for the longest tenure of a modern-day British prime minister. If Brown becomes the Prime Minister that may well be a coup for online gambling. Blair has been criticized for his handling of the war in Iraq, and was this week pressed by a BBC journalist to "apologize" to the people of Iraq for the terrorist insurgency there.
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