Spain Pledges to Step up Regulatory Pressure on Gambling Sector

Spain’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs, alongside the country’s native gaming regulator, the DGOJ, are planning escalate the severity of punishments given to local operators for contraventions of gambling laws. During a busy first six months of 2022, the Ministry, who were awarded responsibility to govern Spain’s gambling sector after the new ‘Gambling Regulation Law’ was implemented in 2021, dished out a staggering €84.3m in fines – over €25m more than the collective value of financial penalties imposed throughout the entirety of the previous year.

Fines were attributed for a mixture of ‘very Serious’ and ‘serious’ violations, with a total of 53 operators reprimanded under the former description. Within this pool of gambling firms, 21 received the maximum punishment – a two-year licencing suspension, and an order to make their products inaccessible to the Spanish public.

Those who were found to have presided over ‘serious infractions of the Gambling Law’ were allocated fines in the region of €4-5m, whilst a raft of operators was subjected to a charge of €1m each.

Despite this level of activity, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs will be even more aggressive in its monitoring of regulatory integrity in the coming months, as the DGOJ continues to post a ‘list of infringements’ (detailing the nature of operator contraventions) to its website in order to maintain a level of transparency across the sector. The Ministry will be supported in its campaign by a series of amendments to the current ‘Gambling Regulation Law’, which will enforce operators to incorporate stronger social responsibility measures and afford the authority better visibility on the financial conduct of industry players.