iGaming Daily

Viktor Kayed (00:03.586)
The Senate of Romania will delay its review of string and gambling reforms proposed by the political party Save Romania Union. The decision follows Romania's election of a new president after the rescheduled general election held on 18 May. iGamingDaily examines the long-standing conflicts and fallout within Romania's gambling sector, a market rocked by regulatory scandals in 2025.

Authorities now face pressure to implement tough measures to restore stability and trust in the system. I'm Victor Cayet, today's host for iGaming Daily. I'm joined by Ted Menmour, editor at large. But before we dive into it, a quick message from our sponsors, OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming Daily.

But before we dive into it, a quick message from our sponsors OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. Ted, welcome to the Podcast Meet. How are you doing?

Ted Menmuir (01:09.743)
Very well Victor, how was your weekend?

Viktor Kayed (01:12.494)
Yeah, it was alright. It was pretty chill. out of the ordinary. I don't want to sound like a boring person, but I just stayed home and relaxed after a long week. How was yours?

Ted Menmuir (01:24.937)
Good, good, good. Watched PSG stomp on inter, which was very unexpected for me. And I'd like to apologize to Betson for writing a feature on them. I think we're cursed.

Viktor Kayed (01:29.421)
Yeah?

Yeah.

Viktor Kayed (01:41.198)
We know better for the next time. We know better.

Ted Menmuir (01:44.989)
Yes, yes, please, please do not come to SPC for any football information.

Viktor Kayed (01:52.782)
That's a joke, obviously. Please do come to SPC to stay informed. football aside, think SPC and you specifically are quite a good source for regulatory news, especially

Ted Menmuir (01:58.357)
Just not a table.

Ted Menmuir (02:15.999)
Thank you.

Viktor Kayed (02:17.695)
especially in Europe and today we have the market of Romania to look at and you've covered it quite extensively. is a lot going on at the moment in there so my first question to you is can you detail why the Senate of Romania has postponed its review of the gambling reforms?

Ted Menmuir (02:38.581)
Okay, so we've got to begin with the political backdrop to Romania. It's been a turbulent 12 months for Romanian politics, which in May concluded with its rescheduled presidential elections that were put back due to foreign interference. The elections were won by former Bucharest mayor Niscor Dan, and he seeks to reset the government's agenda due to a backlog of parliamentary issues.

And of significance, Dan has now entered a period of negotiations to pick a prime minister from an opposition party to set a unified agenda for the government's legislative affairs and to set kind of the timetable for the new government. So the Senate mirroring these conditions has chosen to review kind of key delays and one of being on gambling, gambling reforms.

Viktor Kayed (03:35.629)
And the reforms are being proposed by the Save Romania Union Party. What principal changes is this party looking to implement?

Ted Menmuir (03:51.357)
So the state of the Romanian Union party, the USSR, have been the biggest critics of gambling in Romania, the structure of gambling. And they have called for a regulatory overhaul of Romanian gambling in light of the fallout of the gambling office, the ONJN. And they seek to...

Viktor Kayed (04:10.326)
Mm-hmm.

Ted Menmuir (04:12.467)
basically temporarily replace the ONJ's governance and put it to the Ministry of Finance and the Tax Office. In addition, they've submitted two bills on consumer protections and the governance of the industry. The first bill aims to revamp remaining self-exclusion into a centralized system, providing kind of much tougher safeguards and conditions on how players can self-exclude. And in essence, they're looking for a one-touch self-exclusion solution to be implemented across all remaining

gambling licenses. The second bill, it proposes a hard ceiling on gambling spend and it wants to limit consumers expenditure to 10 % of an individual's declared monthly income that will be monitored by the tax office. It's an enforcement that needs to be reviewed by the Senate and technical commissions because

The USSR is accused of implementing the or proposing the hard sealing without any technical discretion. So it's been criticized for that as in they put in the bill without any technical notice of it will just be controlled by the tax office.

Viktor Kayed (05:27.981)
Do you know if they have been in in talks with the industry at all with operators with the private sector in general? No

Ted Menmuir (05:35.175)
No, no, and this is what's caused the backlash and again the much of the fallout here is between the the The gambling office of remania the onjn and the ussr party's leadership itself, which is asked for the onj to be kind of this dismantled Yes

Viktor Kayed (05:56.042)
I think you just said USSR there. I was going to say there's just one S missing from this information campaign, yeah, USSR party. And the ONGN office, we've seen a lot, it's attracted more negative attention than positive in the last kind of.

few months. Can you explain the fallout from the regulator failing its audit of accounts?

Ted Menmuir (06:29.789)
Okay, this reflects kind of a deep, period of kind of political instability in Romania. And at the start of the year, the INJN were put under a specific auditing by Romania's Chartered Accounts Office.

who found that during the period of 2019 to 2023, it could claim an unaccounted tax bill or tax collections and fees of near a billion, one billion euros that they hadn't collected.

Now the INJN refutes those claims stating that it had tried to implement the tax fees but due to changing record conditions it never could go forth with them. And also it accused the government that it hadn't been given the right systems and settings to be able to proceed with the tax. So what it did was file for the taxes but never claimed them.

The former ONJ executives were asked to stand to the select committee but they refused to, stating that they believed that the select committee was governed by the USR party and that they did not want to be put forward to a kangaroo court. So it's been a period of a lot of drama in remaining politics.

Viktor Kayed (07:50.306)
Mm-hmm.

Viktor Kayed (08:01.079)
So, I'm going to review back to the ONGN's response. Let's summarize it. So, the regulator has said that, from what I'm understanding, they're saying they weren't really supported by the government to collect these taxes.

and now they're fearing that the scrutiny is blown out of proportion because it's coming from the US party. Is that correct?

Ted Menmuir (08:32.24)
In a sense, yes, but what the ONJN said was that there was an upheaval, a four-year upheaval in remaining gambling in terms of new fees.

and new taxes being imposed by the government via following consecutive years also kind of a much tougher governance or monitoring of the licenses themselves and they said that they don't have they never were given the technical requirements to proceed with these inspections now the ONJ have said that they have recorded

what tax collection should have been, but they never proceeded to take in or collect the taxes themselves.

Viktor Kayed (09:18.189)
Interesting, exactly. That's what I was going to say. don't everybody's putting the blame on to the other person. And this is not a you know, this is not a game. We're talking about one one billion euros here and a lot of uncertainty placed on operators that are active in this market as well.

Ted Menmuir (09:21.983)
So it's very much a blame game of,

Ted Menmuir (09:27.839)
Yeah

Ted Menmuir (09:36.02)
Mm-hmm.

Viktor Kayed (09:46.515)
But yeah, yeah, definitely an interesting development. We're going to leave for a short break here and then we're going to dive straight back into it.

Viktor Kayed (09:59.402)
And we're back. Ted, you've summarized the developments in Romania pretty much. You've hit the nail on the head pretty much. But can you take a deeper dive into what the long-standing structural issues are in Romania that are affecting the gambling sector?

Ted Menmuir (10:28.953)
It's very interesting because Romania's gambling sector is one of the younger ones in Europe and I think that it's kind of progressed from being very retail focused to kind of its online expansion and its online expansion coincided with Romania being asked to adopt a lot of kind of compliance measures.

in light of European bodies and European regulatory procedures in which it never implemented that, but it acted in the front foot and tried to apply structural changes that never came to play. The other factor here is that the changes in government of Romania saw

Gamlin tax being targeted and being changed from a period of, I think 2018 all the way to 2023 with consecutive kind of increases in fees. And also they changed kind of the structure overall of taxation. So it went from quite a simplified.

blanket structure to multiple units and also they changed the kind of structure overall for land-based gambling and taxes as they welcomed the venues.

what machine the venues can operate, but also the taxation of those machines, of those table games, and they compartmentalized every type of tax criteria. So it's been an area of confusion, of kind regulatory imbalance for all stakeholders.

Viktor Kayed (12:10.381)
And how has the ONGN handled these developments over the years?

Ted Menmuir (12:19.637)
Well, it depends which party you talk to. The divisions are, I mean, I think there are two camps. There's one camp that wants to kind of restart remaining gambling from the roots and branch, get rid of the ONJ and that's clearly by the USR party.

Viktor Kayed (12:22.957)
Hahaha

Viktor Kayed (12:38.742)
Mm-hmm.

Ted Menmuir (12:39.733)
There is kind of an understanding there that this is an organization that has seen six presidents in the last, since 2018 govern the department and they've all kind of come back and gone back to those kind of structural issues facing remaining gambling or how it kind of catches up with other regulatory bodies. It does actually remaining government kind of understand its kind of regulatory path in the coming years.

Viktor Kayed (13:07.9)
And I don't know according to you this is purely your opinion given the fact that there's been six presidents in such a short time and they keep facing the same challenges over and over. Do you think an overhaul of the ONGN is due?

Ted Menmuir (13:23.081)
Yes, yes it is. mean, I think, look, in terms of the self-exclusion bill, I think that's likely to pull through. I think part of the issue here is...

I don't necessarily think that Romanian authorities or the wider statute of Romania understands how gambling should be regulated and which bodies should be involved in the regulation of gambling. And I think that that's an area where the government is going to have to sit down and look at. So if you are going to organise the ONJ from the top down, you're expected to see, you know, to answer these big questions of like, what is the governance of gambling?

Viktor Kayed (13:59.886)
And they can always turn to Europe for kind of inspiration because there's so many great markets out there

Ted Menmuir (14:07.189)
No, but I mean, at the same time, and I'll throw the question back at you. I mean, you you covered the Bulgarian market and that kind of pressure to modernize and to kind of accelerate that is hard and it's hard on the younger nations. And especially like when we speak about harmonization in European gamings, is that achievable when there's such a kind of disbalance between the regions at play?

Viktor Kayed (14:20.065)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially.

Viktor Kayed (14:33.599)
Yes, and I've seen many voices in Bulgaria criticizing Europe exactly for that reason that there is no unified framework.

to govern gambling but it's really difficult to do man. Every market is a unique market, it has its own problems, social structures and starting anew is going to be huge task and if...

Ted Menmuir (14:51.626)
Yeah.

Viktor Kayed (15:05.249)
the US has proposed such developments to gambling restructuring developments. I hope that they know how big of a task it is because it risks making the market unattractive to the wider international shareholders. On that point,

Ted Menmuir (15:27.125)
Mm-hmm.

Viktor Kayed (15:33.269)
Scandals aside, you think Romania is still considered a dynamic gambling market?

Ted Menmuir (15:39.273)
Very much so. And it's kind of this very weird paradox that, okay, it might not be the most functional market, but it's very competitive. And you've got your likes of Fortuna Bats, Super Bats, who are now being backed by Blackstone. There's been &A there with 888 doing an acquisition in that market, sorry, Evoque.

Viktor Kayed (15:49.217)
Mm-hmm.

Ted Menmuir (16:03.469)
And it's a market that's withstood kind of its regulatory play out. And Romania is attracted to the international operators.

Viktor Kayed (16:15.213)
And international operators are attractive are attracted to Romania too Yeah, you were gonna add something there Okay, and one last question to send you off I think we've covered everything recent and not that recent so far Looking ahead. How do you plan to follow the markets development in the coming months?

Ted Menmuir (16:19.911)
Mm-hmm.

Ted Menmuir (16:24.339)
No, no, no.

Ted Menmuir (16:44.623)
I actually think Romania is a market to watch out for and I think look it is at a point of inflation you are looking at new government and a new body to the INJN and I think that it faces critical questions in which part it follows but at the same time I mean going back to what I saying it is a dynamic gambling market it does carry kind of international appeal

I'll be looking at it very, very, very, very intrigued. And I think that it's a market that should not be slept on.

Viktor Kayed (17:18.487)
Mm-hmm.

Viktor Kayed (17:24.845)
And yeah, it's gonna be one of the boiling pots in Europe this year, that's for certain. But yeah, to all our listeners, if you're interested in our markets, follow SPC News and Ted Menmue's coverage especially for the latest updates and developments in the country. I was Victor Cayet for iGamingDaily.

Ted Menmuir (17:33.128)
Yeah.

Viktor Kayed (17:52.28)
Thank you for listening, stay tuned for the next episode.