investors europe stock brokers NEWS: PartyGaming Plc - Fueps joins PartyGaming's Italian poker network
http://www.partygaming.com/prty/en/mediacentre/pressreleases/financialnews/?ref=242
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Gibraltar Stock Brokers NEWS: 'PartyGaming Plc - 2008 Annual Report Wins Three Prestigious Awards'
PartyGaming, the worlds leading listed online gaming company, is proud to announce that it has won three prestigious awards for its 2008 Annual Report, 'Site Years Ahead', from Accountancy Age and the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA), which works closely with governmental and regulatory bodies to promote and support best practice in all areas of corporate governance.
To view the announcement in full, please click on the link below: http://www.partygaming.com/prty/en/mediacentre/pressreleases/financialnews?ref=241
Investors Europe Gibraltar Stock Brokers #NEWS: PartyGaming Plc - Acquisition of World Poker Tour completed
PartyGaming, the world?s leading listed online gaming company, announces the completion of the acquisition of the business and substantially all of the assets of WPT Enterprises Inc. (?WPTE?) for a cash consideration of $12.3 million plus an additional minimum aggregate payment of $3m over the next three years relating to an ongoing revenue share agreement.
To view the announcement in full, please click on the link below: http://www.partygaming.com/prty/en/mediacentre/pressreleases/financialnews/?ref=240
NEWS: PartyGaming Plc - PartyGaming Plc Shares Trust Purchase of 1 million PartyGaming Shares
PartyGaming announces that the PartyGaming Plc Shares Trust (the “Trust”) yesterday purchased 1 million PartyGaming ordinary shares of 0.015 pence each (the “Shares”) at an average price of 248.01 pence per share. Funds to carry out this purchase were gifted to the Trust by the Company and these Shares will be used to satisfy awards made under the Company’s existing long term incentive plans.To view the announcement in full, please click on the link below:http://www.partygaming.com/prty/en/mediacentre/pressreleases/financialnews/?ref=234
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Online Gambling is Back!
Somewhere in a remote part of southern England, during a quiet Friday lunchtime, a man places a £30 bet on his computer on ice hockey matches in Switzerland, Slovenia, Russia and Germany. He bets that the matches will average more than five-and-a-half goals a game and stands to make a few hundred pounds.
Moments later, in the London headquarters of Ladbrokes, the bet is received and processed. It is one of around 150,000 online transactions that Britain’s biggest land-based bookmaker will undertake that day.
Ladbrokes built its reputation on men walking into its smoke-filled, shabby high street shops to wager on UK horse-racing. But now the company is part of the internet revolution that is reshaping gambling and propelling the business into the homes of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Such is the growth of online betting and its disregard of national boundaries that a number of countries rushed out legislation to suppress it – partly to protect land-based monopolies, partly out of fear that unlimited gambling on the internet would multiply addiction and become a magnet for money laundering. Prosecutors joined the offensive, arresting chief executives and other directors of online gambling companies at airports and parading some of them in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits.
But the tide has shifted: this year is set to mark the moment when gambling online reaches a measure of acceptance and respectability its detractors on both sides of the Atlantic have long fought to prevent. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat congressman and chairman of the House of Representatives’ powerful financial services committee, plans to resubmit a bill in the next few weeks that would unravel legislation passed under the administration of George W. Bush to keep online gambling out of the US.
It is not merely a Democratic-run White House and Congress that enables Mr Frank to assert that the gambling debate is “moving in the right direction”. Online gambling is a fundamental freedom, Mr Frank maintains, and attempts to make it illegal smack of a rightwing puritanical zeal that led to Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s.
“It is often the case in politics that the people who want change get energised,” says Mr Frank, adding that the political momentum in the US is coming from poker players. “This is impinging on their freedom and they are fighting back.”
Online gambling has embroiled the US and European governments not just in strenuous efforts to control the march of technology but also in transatlantic battles over their obligations to global trade treaties. Europe wants to hold the US to account for violating commitments to the World Trade Organisation to liberalise gambling.
That online gambling should become such a touchstone both for issues of personal freedom and global trade is a mark of just how widespread it is becoming. The precise scale is impossible to calculate because so much of it takes place on the borders of legality – or beyond. According to the Isle of Man-based Global Betting and Gaming Consultants, gambling around the world generates $370bn (€290bn, £259bn) in annual gross win – the amount retained by operators after paying out winnings – with online gambling accounting for $17bn of that.
But Warwick Bartlett of GBGC says that amount is attributed only to licensed operators, the real figure being much higher. “We have been able to track several companies on the internet whose turnover is five times that amount,” he says. “Much of the US business is going offshore to places like Costa Rica – and gambling in China, 95 per cent of which is illegal, is massive.”
The rise contrasts with a decline in gambling’s traditional centres, the land-based casinos, which are suffering in the global economic downturn. On the Las Vegas Strip, casinos are seeing profits halved as people stay away from their tables, while the giant casinos of Chinese-administered Macao are feeling an additional squeeze from travel restrictions imposed by Beijing on mainland nationals to curb gambling. For their part, Europe’s casino operators are being hampered by recently introduced smoking bans.
But recession has not put off analysts from predicting strong growth for companies in the online sector, even in the face of increased competition. Broadband internet is the main driver. Broadband penetration is expected to increase from 30 per cent of European homes in 2008 to nearly 40 per cent in 2012 – by which year it will have reached 11 per cent of homes globally.
Online gambling’s ability to refresh itself as technology advances is another factor. Operators offer a blizzard of games in a variety of languages and appropriate to different markets. Global brands put their names to them, PartyGaming, one of the biggest European-based operators, offers Mission: Impossible slot machine games, for instance.
Customers wanting interaction can play against each other at poker and backgammon. To make sports betting more exciting (as well as more lucrative), operators update their odds during matches to enable punters to carry on betting.
Authorities have varied in how they adjust to this new world. The European Commission, pushing to open gambling markets, repeatedly threatens member states with enforcement action if they continue to take a hard line. But since the UK created the most liberal online gambling market in 2007, countries such as Ireland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Belgium are leaning in the same direction. Operators have flocked to Spain and Italy as those markets open up.
While Germany remains opposed and Scandinavian countries drag their feet, attention is turning to France. A hardline approach, which saw the chief executives of German and Dutch-based operators arrested, has gone. Now, France is preparing to publish a draft law that promises a regulated market, albeit with stringent conditions.
“The [French] market is virtually open,” says Emmanuel de Rohan Chabot, founder of Zeturf, which offers bets on horse-racing in Europe. “Officially it’s not, but people act as if it’s open.”
But as a patchwork of slow but steady liberalisation forms across Europe, the market the industry really wants to see opened up is the US, where betting is restricted to casinos, state lotteries, race-tracks and slot machine parlours. It was there that listed companies such as UK-based PartyGaming and Sportingbet and a host of unlicensed operators were by the middle of the decade making millions from online poker and casino. With their servers off US soil, they believed they were out of the reach of prosecutors and could operate with impunity.
Such bravado crumbled in 2006 when Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, making it illegal for credit card companies to process online bets. The law came into effect only last month, delayed by complaints from financial institutions about the practicality of implementing it. But the Department of Justice began carrying out high-profile arrests of gaming executives for allegedly violating the Wire Act of 1961, which banned interstate telephone bets.
To some observers, it was a throwback to the days when the DoJ enforced the writ of attorney-general Robert Kennedy, who made gambling a focus of his crusade against the Mob.
Industry experts think the new Congress will respond more favourably to renewed efforts by Democrats, notably Mr Frank, to allow regulated online operations. The administration of President Barack Obama, while unlikely to advocate that change, is expected to play the role of passive bystander.
The DoJ’s enforcement actions against individuals and companies may meanwhile be winding down. The department chalked up one notable victory in December when Anurag Dikshit (left), co-founder of PartyGaming, pleaded guilty to a single charge of online gambling and forfeited $300m, an outcome that in effect ends the liability hanging over him.
PartyGaming is itself in talks with the DoJ with an aim to settle their US liabilities at a cost to the company of $50m-$100m. Mr Frank says the reactivation of the DoJ on gambling was “a political deal to appease the religious right”, one that dies under Mr Obama. The financial services industry continues to complain about the hazards of implementing the 2006 law, he adds.
Overturning it is likely to take time. In the face of depleted revenues, Las Vegas operators including Harrah’s and MGM Mirage want online gambling but not all their casino rivals support it.
Back across the Atlantic, online operators such as Ladbrokes will continue to make money out of punters such as the ice hockey fan. Patrick Jay, Ladbrokes’ sports director, taps a few keys himself to establish that the fan is someone who bets low stakes but does so around three times a day, so over the years he has wagered more than £20,000.
“He’s a good customer,” says Mr Jay. It is a view strengthened when the executive discovers that the fan’s internet account shows a net profit to Ladbrokes of £4,000. “That’s a good margin on a customer.”
