Coral head of trading resigns

Head of Trading Sam Foulkes has quit Coral. He left earlier this month having tendered his resignation in December, and is now seeing out a period of gardening leave.

Sam FoulkesNews of Foulkes’ departure comes just five months after he had been promoted to the head of trading role, which saw him relocate from Coral’s Stratford headquarters to the operator’s Gibraltar offices.

The move was part of a wider restructuring of the sportsbook trading division, which also saw Danny Greer become head of in-play and the trading division split to form separate in-play and pre-match pricing teams.

Foulkes joined Coral in 2012 after having previously spent eight years at rival William Hill, where he had held various roles including senior trader and head of in-play football. Speaking to eGaming Review, he said it was the right time to move on:

“I am immensely proud of my achievements at Coral and after four years, I felt it was the right time for a new challenge. I’ve had a number of exciting work offers already and I’m expecting to take up a new role within the next few months.”

A spokesperson for the operator confirmed: “Sam recently left Coral and we wish him the very best for the future. No decision been made on how to replace him but we have a strong team so we are not in any hurry to decide.”

Sweden’s regulated online market growing faster than international operators

Sweden’s regulated online gambling market grew faster than international Swedish-facing operators last year, according to the country’s gambling regulator.

Preliminary stats for 2015 released by Sweden’s Lotteriinspektionen gaming overseer said the regulated market boasted turnover of SEK 45.6b ($5.3b), up 1.5% from 2014’s total. Total gaming revenue was also up 1.5% to SEK 16.7b.

Total online gambling revenue last year came to around SEK 8b, up around 7% from 2014. Lotteriinspektionen estimates that international operators serving the market without a Swedish license – mainly because Sweden doesn’t currently issue licenses to bloody foreigners – claimed around SEK 4.4b of this sum.

The international operators’ share eclipsed the SEK 3.6b collected by the state-owned betting monopoly Svenska Spel, but the monopoly’s share was up 8% year-on-year while the international sites grew only 6%.

Gambling advertising expenditure came to around SEK 3.3b, with roughly 70% of this being spent by those pesky international operators, despite the government’s vocal protestations. The total advertising spend is actually down from 2014, which the regulator attributes to last year’s lack of a marquee football competition.

On average, Swedish households spent around 2.4% of their disposable income on regulated gambling products last year, a sum equal to about SEK5,822 ($685) per person. The average Swedish adult lost around SEK 2,133 to the regulated market, while the average loss to international online gambling operators was a mere SEK 447 per adult.

Sweden is in the process of revising its online gambling market, prompted by years of public scolding and threats of legal action by European Commission watchdogs. New draft legislation is expected early next year, followed by a period of stakeholder comment and a final draft presented to legislators for consideration by the end of 2017.

The new regime is expected to call for the privatization of Svenska Spel, the issuing of licenses to international operators and more aggressive steps to prevent online operators not holding a Swedish license from accessing the market. Last month, a leading Swedish internet service provider went public with government plans to compel ISPs to block Swedes from accessing unauthorized sites.

Tennis under the scanner again: Two umpires banned for gambling, but ITF kept it secret, reveals report

Controversy seems to be stalking tennis like a shadow. In a latest blow to the beleaguered sport still grappling with allegations of widespread match-fixing, a report on Tuesday in Guardian newspaper claimed two international tennis umpires have been secretly banned while four others may be thrown out of the sport for life on charges of serious corruption.

According to the report, betting syndicates allegedly bribed umpires from Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine in exchange for manipulating live scores on ITF’s Futures Tour which then allowed gamblers to place neat little bets since they were already sure of the outcome of the next point.

Kazakhstan’s Kirill Parfenov was banned for life in February last year while Croatia’s Denis Pitner was slapped with a one-year ban last August but both cases were kept under wraps.

Parfenov, the Kazakh official, reportedly tried to manipulate the scoring of matches by getting in touch with contacts through Facebook while the Croatian frequently logged on to a betting account from which bets were placed on tennis matches, according to the report.

Details of the probe and the resultant penal action were never released in public domain. The tennis authorities preferred to alert only a small number of tournament directors and national federations, said the report.

The development brings renewed focus about the extent of corruption in tennis and raises fresh concerns about lack of transparency in the governing body.

The sport was thrown into turmoil during the Australian Open this year when world No.1 Novak Djokovic made a stunning revelation that he was approached to fix a match earlier in his career.

Talking to reporters in Melbourne on 19 January, Djokovic said: “I was not approached directly. I was approached through people that were working with me at that time… Of course, we threw it away right away. It didn’t even get to me, the guy that was trying to talk to me, didn't even get to me directly. There was nothing out of it.

“Unfortunately in those times (there were) rumours, some talks, some people were going around. They were dealt with.

“In the last six, seven years, I haven’t heard anything similar. I personally was never approached directly, so I have nothing more to say about that.”

Djokovic’s comments came after the BBC and BuzzFeed cited “leaked files” to claim that players who had reached top 50 had been repeatedly suspected of fixing matches but had never faced action.

It led to all tennis authorities — the ATP, WTA, ITF and the heads of all four Grand Slams —announcing an independent probe into cases of alleged corruption.

PartyPoker to return to 21 online gambling markets under GVC

PartyPoker returns to 21 new online gambling markets including jurisdictions it exited as part of its “volume to value” strategy.

PartyPoker has begun operating in a number of new national markets after GVC Holdings completed its deal to buy bwin.party.

Bwin’s online poker room has written to affiliates asking them to estimate the number of first time depositors they anticipate in each market.

New sign-ups from 18 countries in EU and South America served by bwin.Party were blocked in April 2013. The decision was likely a mix of regulatory concern and simple cost analysis. The remaining countries may represent markets either too small or simply unprofitable for bwin.party to maintain operations in.

Many EU countries on the list curbed or prohibited online poker such as Greece, Poland, Romania, Cyprus and Hungary. Finland and Serbia, on the other hand, had a small regulated online poker markets.

South American countries — Argentina, Brazil and Colombia — were also blocked same with three former Soviet Republics Armenia, Belarus and the Ukraine.

Many of the markets that PartyPoker is re-entering are expected to introduce online poker licensing systems such as Colombia, which opened a consultation on launching a regulated online gambling market. Brazil has approved a legislative attempt to legalize online sports betting, casino and bingo games last year.

Bwin.party group head of partypoker and Cashcade Tom Waters confirmed the news to EGR, saying that it had re-opened in a “limited number of regulated territories” following a “thorough review” of PartyPoker’s operations.

“Along with other operators in the industry, we do accept gameplay from customers based in yet to be regulated territories where customers are not prevented from accessing online gaming products,” said Waters. “We have re-opened registration for a number of markets and could potentially look to do more if the commercials support it.”

William Hill, Unibet and Betway blacklisted by Lithuania

William Hill, Unibet and Betway have all been blacklisted in Lithuania following a request by the Lithuania Gaming Control Authority to the countries ISP providers to block the companies offering online gambling to residents.

Under orders from the National Parliament after a list of blacklisted companies was drawn up who are deemed to have broken national online gambling laws.

The three online operators are the first of the International companies to have been blacklisted with more to follow it is understood. The move follows new laws that were passed at the beginning of the year to tighten regulations on overseas companies offering online gambling within the country.

At present only online sites TonyBet and Orakulas are allowed to offer online gambling within Lithuania as they have been fully licensed within the country.

However those currently blacklisted and those companies that are on the list to be blacklisted are still welcome to apply for an online gambling license to offer online games said the Gaming Control Authority.

French online betting grows but profits remain elusive

France’s online betting volumes continued to grow impressively in 2015 but the country’s igaming market is still precarious, year-end figures from the country’s regulator ARJEL reveal.

The figures show that online betting revenues from regulated operators did not slow down in 2015, despite no major football tournament such as the 2014 World Cup taking place.

Betting stakes rose 30% during 2015, reaching €1.44bn, while stakes placed in the fourth quarter of the year beat all previous records and reached €452m, the highest volume since the market regulated in 2010.

The rise in betting volumes is a result of an 8% rise in the number of weekly active punters to 200,000 and an increase of 1.8 points in the pay out ratio to 81.3%, which led to French punters betting more.

Gross profits were up 19% for betting operators to €270m on 2014’s figure of €227m. However, with operators’ taxes based on stakes the level of taxation works out at 46% of gross profits and net profits for online betting, the actual amount operators are left with and from which they pay their running costs, rose just 6% in 2015.

French-licensed betting operators recorded losses of €11m in 2014 and it is highly likely that they will continue to be loss-making in 2015.

In terms of market share, new entrant Winamax, which diversified by launching a betting site in May 2014 and Unibet have been highly aggressive in going after French players.

Stakes for horse racing pari mutuel were down 2% to €1bn, their lowest level since 2010, while online poker cash game stakes saw a further drop of 14% to €3.7bn although entry fees for tournaments rose 14% to €1.7bn.

GVC looks to offload parts of Bwin's payments division

Online gambling company GVC is likely to sell parts of Bwin.Party’s payments business this year and has held early talks with payments processing firms.

Kenny Alexander, the chief executive of GVC, said that after the £1.1bn Bwin takeover he would probably offload small parts of its Kalixa division.

Kalixa is a payments services business and the bulk of its work is for Bwin. However, the subsidiary - which began as Bwin’s internal payments department - has grown and now also manages transactions for other companies such as retailers.

Mr Alexander said he was most likely to sell the parts of Kalixa that handle external processing to another payments business.

“We’ll probably look at maybe disposing of bits of that,” he said. “We’ve had very early discussions.”

The GVC boss dismissed suggestions he might sell Bwin’s Foxy Bingo brand, describing it as “a cracking business”.

GVC is today expected to signal its intention to make further acquisitions with the appointment of a well-regarded City analyst as its head of investor relations and corporate strategy.

Nick Batram, who focuses on the gaming and leisure industries for stockbroker Peel Hunt, is to join GVC and part of his role will be to help it to find new M&A targets.

Mr Alexander said that GVC will probably start to look at fresh bid targets in a year, after the Bwin deal.

The gambling chief also said GVC would also probably sign up to the horseracing industry’s controversial new funding scheme, becoming an “authorised betting partner” of the British Horseracing Authority.

Such partners agree to three-year deals to pay a proportion of their racing revenues to the industry. Several bookmakers that already pay the racing levy on their betting shop estates oppose the new funding arrangements

Tennis match fixing: Evidence of suspected match-fixing revealed

Secret files exposing evidence of widespread suspected match-fixing at the top level of world tennis, including at Wimbledon, can be revealed by the BBC and BuzzFeed News.

Over the last decade, 16 players who have ranked in the top 50 have been repeatedly flagged to the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) over suspicions they have thrown matches.

All of the players, including winners of Grand Slam titles, were allowed to continue competing.

The TIU- set up to police the sport - said it had a zero-tolerance approach to betting-related corruption.

Chris Kermode, who heads the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the body that governs world tennis, rejected claims evidence of match-fixing had "been suppressed for any reason or isn't being thoroughly investigated".

But he added: "While the BBC and BuzzFeed reports mainly refer to events from about 10 years ago, we will investigate any new information."

The cache of documents passed to the BBC and Buzzfeed News include the findings of an investigation set up in 2007 by the ATP.

Its job was to look into suspicious betting activity after a game involving Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo Arguello.

Both players were cleared of violating any rules, but the investigation developed into a much wider enquiry looking into a web of gamblers linked to top-level players.

The documents we have obtained show the enquiry found betting syndicates in Russia, northern Italy and Sicily making hundreds of thousands of pounds betting on matches investigators thought to be fixed. Three of these matches were at Wimbledon.

In a confidential report for the tennis authorities in 2008, the enquiry team said 28 players involved in these matches should be investigated, but the findings were never followed up.

Tennis introduced a new anti-corruption code in 2009 but after taking legal advice were told previous corruption offences could not be pursued.

"As a result, no new investigations into any of the players who were mentioned in the 2008 report were opened," a TIU spokesman said.

In subsequent years, there were repeated alerts sent to the TIU about a third of these players. None of them was disciplined by the TIU.

A group of whistle blowers inside tennis, who want to remain anonymous, recently passed the documents on to the BBC and Buzzfeed News.

We contacted Mark Phillips, one of the betting investigators in the 2007 enquiry, who told the BBC that they discovered repeated suspicious betting activity about a clear group.

"There was a core of about 10 players who we believed were the most common perpetrators that were at the root of the problem," he said.

He has never spoken publicly about the material he gathered, which he said was as powerful as any he had seen in over 20 years as a betting investigator.

"The evidence was really strong," he added. "There appeared to be a really good chance to nip it in the bud and get a strong deterrent out there to root out the main bad apples."

The BBC and Buzzfeed were also passed the names of other current players the TIU have repeatedly been warned about by betting organisations, sports integrity units and professional gamblers.

Many of these players have been on the radar of the tennis authorities for involvement in suspicious matches going back to 2003.

The BBC and Buzzfeed News have decided not to name the players because, without access to their phone, bank and computer records, it is not possible to determine whether they may have been personally taking part in match fixing.

However, tennis' integrity unit does have the power to demand all this evidence from any professional tennis player.

"There is an element of actually keeping things under wraps," said Benn Gunn, a former police chief constable who conducted a major review of betting in tennis that led to the creation of the Tennis Integrity Unit.

It's the first time he has publicly spoken about his concerns.

"If they were really serious about dealing with this, then they really need to create an integrity unit with teeth," he said.

The European Sports Security Association, which monitors betting for leading bookmakers, flagged up more than 50 suspicious matches to the TIU in 2015.

The organisation declared that tennis attracts more suspicious gambling activity than other sport.

While he welcomed the support of the betting industry, Nigel Willerton, director of the TIU, said "it is not the role of betting companies to make judgements about corrupt activity".

He added: "All credible information received by the TIU is analysed, assessed, and investigated by highly experienced former law-enforcement investigators."

The problem of suspicious betting and match-fixing is not going away.

Eight of the players repeatedly flagged to the TIU over the past decade are due to play in the Australian Open which starts on Monday 18 January.

BBC tennis correspondent Russell Fuller:

"The TIU has a full-time staff of just five and relies on intelligence from players and betting companies to alert them to potential corruption. They have a presence at between 20 and 30 tournaments a year, and their investigations over the past two years have resulted in seven players and one official being banned for between six months and a lifetime.

"Only one of those players has ever reached the top 200, and there are clearly temptations for lower-ranked professionals. Players outside the top 200 are unlikely to earn much more than £40,000 in prize money each year, and that is before coaching, travel and hotel expenses are taken into account.

"It is highly debatable whether enough resources are directed towards the TIU, and another potential flaw is that representatives from the sport's four governing bodies decide whether the evidence gathered is strong enough to be presented to an independent hearing. Professional Tennis Integrity Officers from the ITF, ATP, WTA and the Grand Slams make that call, and as a result the process is not as transparent as it should be."

Winning Powerball Tickets Sold in at Least 3 States for Nearly $1.6B Jackpot

The winning Powerball numbers were drawn Wednesday night: 8, 27, 34, 4, 19 and the Powerball of 10.

California lotto officials tweeted almost immediately after that a winning ticket was sold in the state. Later, California Lottery spokesperson Russ Lopez said there were two more winning tickets sold, one in Tennessee and one in Florida.

The California Lottery also tweeted that it sold 12 tickets that matched five of the six numbers.

California lottery officials said the winning ticket was sold at the 7-Eleven on Chino Hills Parkway.

The jackpot, which reached record levels after 20 drawings without a winner, was estimated to be nearly $1.6 billion. According to the Texas Lottery, the cash equivalent was $983.5 million.

This Powerball jackpot first started at $40 million on Nov. 7, 2015.

According to Texas lottery officials earlier today, there was an 85.8 percent of the possible number combinations had been sold.

China's gambling mecca runs of luck

Macau, China’s sole gambling mecca, is the inverse of Las Vegas.

Its tiled promenades are tidy and largely free of panhandlers. There are no flashing pyramids or fake Eiffel Towers, but plenty of stone facades designed centuries ago by Portuguese craftsmen. Inside its 30-plus luxury casinos, gamblers tend to gulp milk tea instead of Jack Daniel’s.

In recent history, Macau has been a raging success story. It has become the world’s most profitable gambling city, raking in more cash between a few of its casinos than the whole of the Vegas strip — all without descending into disorder and open sleaze.

But Macau’s run of good luck is over. The coastal enclave, long flush with mainland Chinese cash, was recently declared the world’s fastest-plummeting economy.

And it ended 2015 with a grim statistic: year-on-year gaming revenue nosedived by just over a third to roughly $30 billion, according to government data. That’s like losing the entire GDP of Cambodia or Senegal at slot machines and card tables.

Macau’s gloom, described by one Hong Kong bank as a “death spiral,” is not about to dissipate anytime soon.

Part of Macau’s downturn can be blamed on China’s overall economic slump. As the only Chinese territory where casinos are legal, Macau soared in the past decade alongside the explosion of Chinese wealth.

But the glitz and glamour of its casinos — one of which is topped with 24-karat gold-gilded cupolas — was paid for by a boom era that China may never replicate again.

The crash is also attributed to a crackdown led by China’s President Xi Jinping. Pervasive corruption, he warns, could bring on the “downfall of the state.”

So he’s crusading to purge every official who’s illegally funneling government funds into their private accounts. This campaign has brought heavy scrutiny to any large sums moved off the mainland — including cash transfers to Macau.

Before the crackdown, high rollers from Shanghai to Shenzhen were easily courted by brokers, some linked to organized crime, who beckon the super rich to Macau’s casinos. These middlemen serve a dual purpose: doting on the wealthy gamblers like royalty while loaning them gobs of cash to be repaid with interest.

Called the “junket” system, it has attracted tycoons and dodgy politicians alike. It’s also notoriously slippery. The American gambling magnate Steve Wynn, whose casino empire stretches to Macau, has described these operations as a “giant, entrepreneurial pyramid scheme” and said monitoring its operators is “almost impossible because they multiply like rabbits.”

Communist party chieftains and their cronies, feeling the government’s gaze upon them, are now rightfully afraid of jaunts to Macau where they may be accused of spending ill-gotten funds or laundering money.

And since China’s corruption crackdown shows no signs of stopping, Macau may be forced to reinvent itself.

There is plenty of excess in Macau, where the skyline is dominated by behemoth gambling complexes — one of which claims to be the largest casino on earth. But Macau has never embraced the brand of in-your-face debauchery epitomized by Vegas.