| | |  | Last Updated: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 |  | | | Pressure on UK for gambling tax breaks
- Sunday, 20 Nov 2005
The new UK Gambling Act, which established a new regulatory office for the wide-ranging gambling industry in Great Britain and which has opened the doors to the possibility of licensing online casino businesses and allowing them to operate their servers on UK soil, is in danger of not attracting the caliber of online gambling company – with the requisite funds to be justified being called such a thing – unless tax concessions of the sensible and generous sort are granted to online gambling companies with the possible regulation of online gambling in the UK.
Online sports betting guru Victor Chandler, head of the Victor Chandler Group, is one of the people who hopes that the authorities are reasonable and understand that from a business perspective the online gambling industry and UK can work together for mutual benefit. "For an operator like me, the only way they'd stand to get us back to the UK is through what I've got here, corporation tax, like any other business, and nothing else," Chandler stated. "It will be interesting to see what the UK government does because they could end up making laws to ensure the industry is properly regulated but then, if they get the tax system wrong, they'll have virtually nobody to regulate because everyone will stay where they are," he added.
The licensing registration regulations for online gambling companies haven’t been finalized yet, but the pressure is on from many who want to see online casino gambling come full steam into the UK. For the moment, online casino companies operate in so-called “tax havens” due more to their inability to legally base servers in the UK than financial costs, but with the possible opening up of server basing in the UK these companies want it to be as advantageous for them as is possible. | |
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