Intralot Happenings
Greek betting technology company Intralot last month won another betting contract in Moldova, for an undisclosed amount, from mobile telephony operator Moldcell. The contract enables Moldcell subscribers to bet via SMS through their mobile phones on the lotto game run by Intralot's Moldovan unit, Loteria Moldovei. Intralot also said the service would soon be expanded to other gaming applications. The company already holds a similar contract with Voxtel, Moldova's leading mobile telephone operator, which has a 64 percent share of the local market.
In other Intralot news, Chairman Socrates Kokkalis has expressed the company's interest in making a bid for the privatization of Turkish lottery Milli Piyango, scheduled for the second half of this year after the completion of necessary legal reforms. Milli Piyango is the smallest of three Turkish betting companies with revenues of about €850 million.
Intralot recently announced its financial results for 2005, leading with total revenues of 523 million, up 64 percent from 2004. Revenues from the company's international subsidiaries totaled 356.4 million, a 71 percent contribution to consolidated turnover, compared to 170 million (or 52.1 percent) in 2004. The official report will be released within the next few weeks.
OPAP Football Betting Prospects
Due to the appointment of new members to the Committee of Professional Athletics,
Greek lottery operator OPAP says it will not introduce Greek football league betting to its fixed-odds betting game, Stihima, until the new season in September. But according to Reuters, OPAP said it may begin offering the betting by the end of May if approval is granted by a government sports committee. "We cannot rule out the possibility of including some Greek (soccer) matches of the current playing season in Stihima," the company said. OPAP said the committee had delayed a ruling after the government appointed the new members, but approval by end-May was still possible.
EssNet Happenings
Scientific Games announced in March month that it has completed the purchase of the online lottery assets of Swedish firm EssNet AB for 460 MSEK ($60 million). The acquisition adds seven states in Germany, the national lotteries of Hungary and Norway, Golden Casket and Tattersall's Lottery in Australia and other national lotteries to its portfolio of customers. EssNet operations will be integrated into Scientific Games over the next few months and should be completed in the second half of 2006.
Tattersall's announced Sunday that it is selling the remainder of its shares of EssNet, in which it has held a 25.16 percent stake, to poker machine maker Aristocrat Leisure. The terms of the deal will be released in May.
Intensions in Korea
The Korean government came under fire last month for its scheme to issue a new lottery with a prize 100 times higher than the current lottery jackpot. Under the new plan, the first prize would be reduced to 1 million won (US$1,000), as part of the government's efforts to "maintain balance' in the lottery market currently dominated by Lotto, the country's biggest lottery draw with a jackpot amounting to 3 billion won. Critics have expressed concerns that the new game could promote a taste for gambling among the public. The government said last January that it would reduce the number of games from 13 to five to prevent proliferation of lotteries.
Distribution Chief
UK Law Society Chief Executive Janet Paraskeva has been named head of the new Olympic Lottery Distributor, which is charged with overseeing the distribution of lottery cash for the 2012 London Olympics. Paraskeva's new role will earn her an additional £10,000 annually for two days of work per month, according to Legal Week.
WLA Convention Bound for Greece
The World Lottery Association's (WLA) Executive Committee has chosen the Greek island of Rhodes as the venue for the WLA convention and trade show. It will be held in mid-September, 2008.
Belgian Bailout
According to a report by Expatica, the Belgium National lottery in March abandoned plans to organize betting for Belgian and foreign soccer matches. The lottery, which said in November that the service would help end the match-fixing problems in the league, planned to offer betting on 15 First Division matches in Belgium and internationally, starting next season. But other international lotteries already allow betting in their domestic matches, and the Belgian lottery is not prepared to set up betting service for Belgian matches only.
Swiping at Littlewoods
Sportech PLC, which owns Littlewoods Gaming, signed a distribution partnership in March with U.K. retail network PayPoint for use with the Littlewoods Football Pools and Lotto products. The new service enables Littlewoods Gaming customers to make a payment with a swipe at any of the 14,000 PayPoint outlets in the UK.
Veikkaus Turnover exceeds €1.3 Billion
Finnish gaming monopoly Veikkaus' reported a turnover of €1.32 billion for the year 2005, with €381.4 million of proceeds being returned to the Ministry of Education and distributed as follows: €185.1 million to arts, €90.0 million to sports, €75.7 million to science and €31.7 million to youth work. Further, the company decided that an additional €14.0 million from contingency fund should be given to the Ministry of Education. The payments will be made in 2006. The rest of the proceeds were returned to the company's contingency fund, which is used to support numerous beneficiaries with over 1 million euros each day. In all, Veikkaus returned €456.5 million to the Finnish state.
Another Threat of Branson Withdrawal
Virgin media mogul Sir Richard Branson posed a six-week deadline for the U.K. National Lottery Commission (NLC) to unveil its rules for bidders of the next National Lottery license and threatened to pull out of the running if it was not met. The license, which has been held by Camelot since the 1994, is up for grabs this year. Branson, who bid in 1994 and 2000 to run a not-for-profit lottery, is still very much interested in taking the license from the incumbent. "If we at Virgin don't know where we stand in the next six weeks, we will walk away," Branson said, "and I'm afraid that means the lottery will be handed over to Camelot, once again, on a plate." The NLC is due to publish its initial invitation to tender this month, with final bids due in October.