05/11/06 Herald Tribune MARTIN WILLIAMS
Britain tops the list in Europe for online gambling

Britain is leading Europe in its appetite for online betting with the number of gamblers doubling in the past five years.

An independent research review reveals that of the 3.3 million regular online gamblers in Europe, one in three are from the UK.
Europe's regular gamblers stake around £3.5bn a year – an average of £1000 each.

The review, published by the government, was commissioned ahead of the first international online gambling summit held yesterday. There are now 2300 gambling web sites across the world. Many are based in a few key nations with Antigua, which hosts 537, top of the pile, and Costa Rica second with 474.

Internet gambling on many sports is illegal in the US and many online betting firms have set up offshore tax havens which are among the 85 areas of the world that current regulate online betting to dodge the US laws.

Tessa Jowell, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary and Richard Caborn, the Sports Minister, spent the morning in talks with representatives from 33 different countries at Ascot racecourse to agree a communique setting out shared regulatory principles upon which they all agreed.

Ms Jowell said the research proved there was a need to secure international support for agreed standards of regulation of online gambling.

She said: "Of course, we also want online gambling companies to come onshore. We will welcome them here because we believe that by allowing those who want to gamble to do so over the counter, not under the counter, is the best way to protect children and vulnerable people and keep out crime."

Ms Jowell said the American approach was "the new prohibition", referring to US efforts to ban alcohol in the early 20th century.
"The enormous risk of prohibition, as we saw in America during the 1920s and 1930s, is that you drive the industry underground," she said. "Our purpose is protection. If gambling becomes an illicit activity, then we can't do that."

Mr Caborn denied claims that the UK was only reacting to action taken in America and that the attempt to regulate the online gambling industry was not a bid to "grab" tax revenue.

He also stressed that the government would not protect UK online gaming executives from extradition requests if they took internet bets from countries in which they were illegal.

Scotland's worst case of internet gambling addiction involved Richard Mahan, a 25-year-old from Aberdeen who used 13 different credit cards belonging to his mother and father to blow £158,000 in two hours. He was sentenced to three years' probation after admitting 13 fraud charges in July.

An action plan contained within the document proposes co-operation between countries in the development of measures to check game players' ages and identity and ways to address problem gambling and addiction.