Ukraine government has approved the new Action Program, which includes draft legislation that would regulate gambling in the country.
The content of the draft bill (No. 2285) is not currently publicly available, but according to the cabinet’s announcement, the law would permit gambling “exclusively on the territory of hotels, with the use of gambling equipment with software that meets international standards.”
The government was on the way to legalize gambling in 2018, and this September, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy requested his government to legalize gambling in an effort to combat the shadow economy and stimulate investment activity in the country.
On September 30th, Prime Minister Alexei Goncharuk declared that the bill was motivated by the presence of illegal slot machines around Ukraine.
The Government’s bill aims to comprehensively streamline the organization and conduct of gambling. In particular, the Government proposes to establish the following:
- limit in the number of licenses, gambling establishments, and gaming equipment;
- the requirement to place gambling establishments exclusively on the territory of hotels (three-star – five-star hotels – for slot machines and five-star hotels – for casinos);
- mandatory verification of players when accepting bets/payouts and registering wins in the “Online Monitoring System” administered by the tax service;
- mandatory certification of gambling equipment according to international standards;
- increased financial and criminal liability for non-licensed gambling activities;
- mandatory targeting of fees for gambling licenses directed to the development of sports, medicine, and culture in Ukraine.
“The government has drafted a bill on the president’s instructions and we voted it on Sunday, it will be tabled in parliament in the next few days,” Goncharuk said. “You know what’s going on: you go outside, you see these slot machines, next to the pawnshops. I don’t think we need to explain what the problem is”.
“A lot of people are suffering from this and we want to protect people who are addicted because people then have depression, suicides, families are destroyed, people lose money. These are tens of thousands of broken human lives, and we want this to end in Ukraine. There should be no such thing in civilized countries”.
“The bill spells out how we propose to regulate gambling, and lotteries will be regulated separately. But the main goal is to remove slot machines from the streets, to reduce this disaster they create for us.”
According to reports from Ukrainian newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda, the bill will include a licence fee of UAH 38m (£1.3m/€1.4mm/$1.5m) for operating a casino in Kiev, UAH 25m for a casino in one of the four other cities with a population of a million or more and UAH 12.5m for a casino anywhere else.
The cost of a sports betting license will be set by a new body, but must not be lower than UAH 750,000 while a slot machine license will cost UAH 7.5m and a poker license UAH 1.3m. All license fees are set in reference to the minimum wage and would increase with any minimum wage rises.
With the exception of the state-run lotteries all other gambling activities became illegal in Ukraine in 2009, after nine people were killed in a fire at a slots parlor in Dnipropetrovsk, but the country has looked to reintroduce legal gambling since 2015, when a new bill to legalize and regulate gambling activities across the country was introduced.
