Sanctioned? Fined? Banned? Not a problem if you're a sports betting company eager to do business. Illegal bookmakers linked to Premier League clubs recently set up stalls at a gambling conference in London, right under the nose of the regulator which had just punished them.
By Philippe Auclair
At the beginning of July, the global gambling industry held one of its regular jamborees, iGBL!ve, at the Excel conference centre in London, with some 15,000 delegates attending the two-day event. So far, so ordinary. Those get-togethers are thirteen a dozen in the industry's calendar, and, in fact, iGBL!ve lags some way behind similar events in terms of attendance, with some of them (ICE and SIGMA among others) drawing twice as many visitors or more. “It was fairly quiet, even a bit subdued compared to previous years”, one of the exhibitors told Josimar after the event.
Yet something set this edition of iGBL!ve apart. The conference took place on the home patch of the Great Britain Gambling Commission (GBGC), which recently took action against one of its most egregious (now ex-) licensees, Isle of Man-based TGP Europe. This was seen as a watershed moment in the relationship between the British regulator and the euphemistically-called “grey sector” of the gambling industry. “Live and let live” was the watchword until then, but not any longer – or so we were led to believe.
TGP Europe is a name will be familiar to Josimar readers, as it has featured prominently in our reporting into the links between English football clubs and illegal (*) Asian-facing sports betting operators over the past five years. TGP, which u...
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