Sports betting sites have been seeing an unusually high level of activity on Manchester United qualifying top of their group in the UEFA Champions league. The really unusual thing abut this is the fact that many people are betting against United in this case.
United have already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition but still need a result tonight to ensure that they finish top of their group.
It would appear that many punters have looked at the long odds on Man. Utd. finishing second and decided that it’s worth a punt. The Manchester United manager, Sir. Alex Ferguson is likely to field a weakened side for tonight’s clash at Old Trafford against Besiktas but most pundits would still consider it to be an optimistic view that the Turkish club will get anything from the match.
Besiktas coach, Denizli, has been under a lot of pressure recently abut his job at the Turkish club and will certainly be hoping that his team do well in this match but even taking these elements into account, it’s still a long shot that Manchester United will not finish up top of the group at the end of the night.
We reported a while back on how the ban on gambling in Russia was facing some difficulty in the area of implementation.
The instant lottery and other ways around the ban, such as places that provide online gambling access but technically charge the customer for Internet access, are proving extremely difficult to deal with for the government.
One of the few bright spots that the government can point to in all of this is that they claim that government revenue is not down significantly due to the ban.
Unfortunately, there is a fundamental difficulty with this assessment of the situation as well. The new surrogate gambling industries that have sprung up in the gray areas of the law have almost certainly mostly plugged the gap that was created when the ban was introduced.
Basically the revenue that was lost has been replaced by money that is derived from the same thing but just in a different form.
When faced with similar problems, other governments have invariably found out that regulation and taxation of the activity is a more workable solution. It will be very interesting to see if the Russian Government persists with its current policy or begins to look at the alternatives that have been more successful elsewhere.
William Hill is in the process of considering a bonds issue. It is believed that the company is looking to raise somewhere in the region of GBP 200 million.
This not the first time that the company has gone to the market recently and follows on from the February 2009 rights issue in which the company raised GBP 350 million.
It is generally excepted that the majority of the cash raised from the bonds issue will be used de-leverage as the company’s debt burden is currently running at GBP 850 million.
The market reacted positively to this news during the course of trading today. The ordinary share started the day at 171.0513 and finished at 1.7513.
That is a rise of 1.03% over the course of the day and there was also a heavy trading volume that was certainly influenced by this news as well.
Obviously, concrete details are still to emerge but it would certainly seem from the evidence that the market is certainly largely positive on the idea.
A we have reported here before, the French Government is right in the middle of putting together new legislation on online gambling.
The new legislation will be quite far reaching and has many aspects to it that are standard when compared with similar legislation elsewhere.
But in a last minute addition the Government has put in an additional requirement that will effectively block one of the major players, Betfair, from entering the market.
This new provision states that any online gambling operator may not permit their customers to lay bets as well as place them.
Unlike virtually all of the other operators in the sector, the Betfair business model is based almost primarily on the concept of this type of spread betting.
This has created a real difficulty for the company as it was hoping to be one of the first major players to enter the newly regulated French market just as soon as it opened up.
A number of possible options are open to the company in terms of how to work with the the new provision but none of the available options are going to be immediately attractive to the company.
While the company is still assessing its options, a spokesman has already stated there is a potentially discriminatory aspect to this new provision which would certainly suggest that the door is being left open for potential legal proceedings at a European Level.
Russia is really struggling with the implementation of its recent ban on gambling. An almost total ban on gambling both online and offline has so far failed to stem the tide. Remarkably, the level of gambling has not fallen since the ban was introduced a few months back but actually risen.
A Moscow official has blamed “surrogate technologies”. This rather vague description is aimed at the instant lottery machines and establishments that offer a specific form of Internet access that have sprung up all over the place.
The lottery scenario is fairly straightforward but the Internet access provision is rather more convoluted and complex.
Essentially, it is a means of providing access to online casinos while working around the law by technically providing Internet access rather than gambling. A very similar situation has arisen in Ukraine that we reported on here a while back.
Government coffers are also still hurting from the loss of revenues caused by the ban. Even in the broader context of the global economic downturn, it is an additional and significant hole in the public finances.
For the moment the Government line is still that the beneficial effects to the country of the ban will heavily outweigh the drawbacks but ultimately only time will tell if this actually turns out to be the case.
Last weekend, The Sunday Times released the ninth annual Tech Track 100 league which lists the 100 fastest growing companies in the technology sector.
The league table, which is sponsored by Microsoft, is generally considered to be a fairly good indicator of what is happening in the tech sector.
While the table is released annually, it actually tracks and uses data from a three year period to make its calculations more stable.
This year Moneybookers has come in at number 6 on the list. As readers familiar with the online casino industry will already know, one of the areas in which Moneybookers is dominant is payment processing in the online casino market.
For the period in question, sales for the company increased from £1.7m to £27.4m and all of this translated into a huge growth rate of over 150%.
What also needs to be remembered and makes these numbers all the more impressive is that this is in spite of having to effectively pull out of the United States market after the 2006 online gambling ban came into effect there.
The company was founded in 2001 and after a big launch did see significant growth in the first couple of years but nothing as significant as the last few years.
With all the talk of the possible repeal of the online gambling ban in the U.S. which would allow the company to re-enter by far the biggest market, the future is looking very bright for Moneybookers.
Ireland is the latest in a long line of countries to see how much revenue is going to offshore casinos and considering legislation to do something about it.
The global economic downturn has caused lots of countries to look at the immensely revenue rich industry with new eyes.
Currently, all gambling activities within the borders of the The Republic Of Ireland are covered (or not) by the 1956 Gaming and Lotteries Act.
This act basically prevents the operation of domestically based online casinos. This has not stopped Irish punters becoming heavy users of off-shore online casinos.
Because of the age of the legislation, it is outdated in many ways but none more so than in the fact that it obviously makes no provisions for online gambling at all.
Ireland has a small open economy and has suffered more that most with the recession. The country is currently in the process of enacting far reaching legislation to set up a National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) in an effort to save the country’s decimated banking system. The State is currently running a 400 million Euro a day deficit in income versus expenditure just to keep public services going.
In short, the country is in dire need of income. Ireland has been quick and progressive in the past in terms of encouraging business. It has the lowest corporation taxation rate in the Euro Zone at 12.5%.
This combination could make for moves to follow a Gibraltar style model where new legislation would not only deal with the issue of allowing punters greater freedom but also making the country very friendly for the operation of online casinos as well.
In one sense this could be a very natural move as one of the industry’s leading software and IT providers CryptoLogic is already based in Ireland
The assembled group leading the drive to gain a clear legal status for online poker in the state of California has just suffered a major setback.
Heading into the last few weeks of the legislative season, the California Senate leader has basically dismissed the idea completely.
This is a very serious setback for the amalgamation of different interested parties led by the California tribal casinos and card clubs.
One of the main tenants of the proposal was that the revenue from taxing any regulated activity in this area could go quite a distance towards fixing the current large deficit that the State’s finances are suffering from.
While the deficit is very real, it would seem that officials are taking a very measured approach to the problem and will not be looking at any legislation in the taxation area until the early part of next year.
Another factor that may have come into play is the fact of the nationwide ban. Any legislation would have to work in the gray areas of the ban. While the 2006 law was very crudely implemented and executed, the state may not wish to get involved in this area at this time.
This last point may turn out to be speculation as we will have to wait until early next year to see what the means and methods of adjusted taxation actually are. In the meantime the alliance of the two leading factions in this group is still very noteworthy and may still turn out to be useful in the long run.
The recession may cause the US government to take another look at online gambling. In light of the global economic downturn individual states are certainly looking at traditional offline gambling as a potential source to bolster declining income.
Currently, 12 states are looking at issuing new licenses or expanding regulated offline gambling in some other fashion. And, they are in a hurry as well. All 12 of these states are going to have their plans in place and operational by 2010.
The global financial crisis has caused a change in thinking at both state and federal level. Apart from the obvious problem of lost revenue in the short term there is also a light being shone on the nature of taxation.
There is now a consensus that current taxation policies tend to rely too much on sources that work well in a buoyant economy but are too unreliable in the context of decreased economic activity.
The fact that casinos, whether offline or online, have the capacity to be extremely profitable is a given. The fact that casinos, while not completely recession proof, perform better than most businesses in a slow economy is what is causing a lot of the renewed interest from legislators.
There is a lot to be said for a source of income that can remain comparatively steady irrespective of financial conditions.
If this is the groundswell of opinion at state level then how long can it be before the subject of online gambling comes back onto the federal radar again?
South Africa has become the latest in a very long line of countries to experience an explosive growth in online gambling.
The activity is currently illegal in the jurisdiction but there is essentially no enforcement of this particular law.
A number of different factors can be pointed to when assessing why this growth is happening now. There has certainly been a large uptake in Internet connectivity in general and broadband in particular.
Other industry watchers point to the fact that South Africa has a very well established offline casino industry and a population that is both comfortable and used to a gambling friendly culture. In light of this it would make sense that wider penetration of broadband would almost inevitably lead to a growth in the area.
Forward-looking officials in the country are furiously attempting to get a legal regulation structure in place. At the moment, all the domestic gambling is done with offshore online casinos.
There are a number of problems with this such as lost revenue and the potential for underage gambling that they hope a new legislative framework would be able to solve.
