Wilkie wants harsher penalties for breaching betting regulations
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie is demanding higher fines for sports betting companies that breach conditions for their licence.
He says current penalties are proving ineffective and may be sending the wrong messages to the $50 billion industry. The comes after a $78,540 fine was handed to Ladbrokes for multiple failures with regards to responsible gambling.
Financial adviser Gavin Fineff stole millions of dollars from clients to service his gambling addiction over a period of 21 months. Instead of investigating the source of Fineff’s funds, Ladbrokes offered $528,890 in bonuses on the $2.2 million he deposited.
The latest penalty is just one of several small fines that have been issued to Australian bookmakers in the past few months.
Bet Nation received a fine of $13,770 last month for sending a promotional offer to hundreds of gamblers who had requested to be banned from betting. Similarly, Betr, which is supported by News Corp, was fined $75,000 for contacting gamblers on the Northern Territory Racing Commission’s self-exclusion register.
READ: Betr facing loss of licence after racking up $75k in fines
Wilkie says that such small fines would be “lost in the company’s margin of error” and is unlikely to prevent such conduct in the future.
“A small fine like this is arguably worse than no fine because of the signal it sends to the industry about what you can expect in future. It says if you are found guilty of the most egregious conduct in the future, you can count on a meaningless fine,” Wilkie said.
“It should be an amount that hurts the company financially and hurts them so much that they think, ‘heavens, we can’t afford that again’. It should hurt them so much that shareholders say to the board, ‘that must not happen again’.”
But experts believe the fine could have been higher despite regulations. The director of policy and campaigns at Financial Counselling Australia, Lauren Kevin, says the NTRC could have imposed a stiffer fine if it took a different approach in categorising the breaches.
“The regulator hasn’t explained why it is treating multiple breaches of Ladbrokes failing to identify problem gambling red flags as a single breach,” Levin said.
“Why hasn’t the regulator treated each ridiculously large deposit that Fineff made as a separate event? On every one of those occasions over the two years, someone made a decision to look away. This has let the business off the hook.”
Wilkie says this case highlights the need for a bill which proposes to hold gambling companies accountable for reporting dubious transaction to AUSTRAC, the financial crime authority.
Despite the fine, Ladbrokes has not returned the lost money to the victims of Fineff’s crime.
