Lottery and horse racing tickets are sold along with 8 betting permits

The government will seek a strategic investor right after the holidays for the state lottery and the Hippodrome, at the same time selling a considerable amount of stocks from the two companies.

It also plans to sell eight to nine licenses for online betting, accelerating the opening up of the gaming market.

Giorgos Papakonstantinou presented the final provisions for the gambling and technical game market. He exposed the current situation to show that the market is fully unregulated and unmonitored, to the detriment of public revenue and society.

Today there is a general prohibition on technical games (these even include games can be played on the internet in internet cafés, and any other game console that is installed in a shop). The European Court of Justice sentenced Greece to pay a fine of about 32.000 euros per day.

Most importantly, however, the total ban has led to precisely the opposite effect to what the government expected. It is estimated that more than 250 online betting spots, up to 20.000 electronic gaming machines of limited profit (AWP’s) and up to 1.500.000 PCs that provide illegal gambling (slot type), are in operation.

In total, the illegal gross from all these games is estimated at more than 4bil per year, from which the Greek state receives nothing.