Delays in Regulating Spain’s Online Gaming Market

The online gaming industry was eagerly awaiting the New Year that was meant to bring with it exciting changes and developments to the online gaming industry. Most expected changes were to do with legalizing and regulating the online gaming market in various European countries.

Sadly not everything went to plan. While Denmark managed to stick to its plan of creating a regulated online market and issuing licenses to various operators so that they can start offering their services to Danish gamblers as soon as 2012 kicks off, other European countries were not as successful at accomplishing that which they set out to accomplish by 2012.

One such country is Spain which announced last week that it is delaying by six months the opening up of its newly regulated online gaming market. The necessary laws were agreed upon back in 2011 and all major European casino operators such as 888 Casino and Party Casino filed for licenses.

The official reason given for the delay is that the Spanish Government wants to allow more time for the regulators to approve operating licenses for various casino operators that suffered delays in their license applications or those that merely had insufficient time to prepare their license applications.

Many operators were caught unprepared by the changes in Spanish legislation. The law regulating the market was only agreed upon in May 2011 and only in November 2011 did the Spanish government grant the final decrees approving the new legislation.

The delay is sure to disappoint all operators that managed to get their license applications ready on time and to the scores of Spanish gamblers that will now have to wait another half a year before they are able to play on licensed online casinos.

However in spite of the delay all operators are expected to profit nicely from the Spanish market when it finally opens. The Spanish market will be much more lucrative for operators than, for example, the French market due to the convenient gaming tax regime that the Spanish government approved.