Portugal Faces New Online Gaming Regulations

Portugal to introduce changes to current gambling law.

The Portuguese online gambling market is facing important changes after the government announced it had prepared an update of the country’s laws and regulations.

The changes were revealed in a LinkedIn post by Ivo Doroteia, a betting industry entrepreneur. According to Doroteia’s post, the State Budget proposal for 2018 includes relevant amendments to the current Online Gambling Law, adopted two and a half years ago, aimed at introducing national and international liquidity sharing in the online gambling market and to revise the allocation of the fixed-odds sports betting tax.

Promoting Online Gambling

With this change of the Online Gambling Law, the government aims to allow licensed operators in Portugal to share their gambling platforms and promote online gambling and betting games to players registered in different Portugal-based websites and provide online gambling and betting games between local players and those based abroad and registered in websites that hold a valid license in the jurisdictions where liquidity sharing is allowed.

According to available information, the amendments proposed by the Portuguese government will not apply to online gambling, but also to sports betting and poker, with the latter already set to expand through a liquidity sharing with France, Italy and neighboring Spain.

The government plans to implement these changes within a regulation which will be issued by the country’s regulator, the SRIJ.

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All those operators that decide to take part in sharing activities will have to abide by new rules, or else they’ll face heavy sanctions.

The State Budget proposal includes an increase in state tax from 2.28% to 3.17% and gives a bigger cut to the ministry promoting social policies, 48.05% instead of 34.52%.

But this is not the only ministry which could see its allocation boosted. The ministry responsible for the promotion of national health policy measures will see an increase of its allocation from 16.44% to 22.88%, the ministry responsible for promoting Home Affairs policies from 2.76 to 5.24%, while the ministry responsible for the national youth and sport policy will have the biggest boost – from just 1.49% to 20.66%.