London-based online operator Sportingbet PLC on Wednesday announced that its founder and executive director, Mark Blandford, has resigned from the company.
"Mark has been a driving force behind both the company and the industry," Sportingbet Chief Executive Andrew McIver said in a prepared statement. "Over the past two years Mark has gradually reduced his executive responsibility, and leaves to pursue other interests."
Sportingbet has seen dark days of late, especially toward the end of 2006, with the arrest of then non-executive director Peter Dicks, who was detained in New York on Sept. 6 while visiting the United States on non-Sportingbet-related business. He was picked up on a warrant from Louisiana--one of eight U.S. states with laws expressly forbidding Internet gambling--as part of an investigation into illegal Internet gambling.
Dicks was cleared to return to his home in England on Sept. 29 after New York Governor George Pataki refused to sign the warrant that would have extradited him to Louisiana.
In October, when the U.S. Senate voted to pass the prohibitive Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), Sportingbet was one of the first companies to withdraw from the U.S. market, selling its U.S.-facing operations for $1. The company announced the sale on Oct. 12, the day before the UIGEA was signed by President Bush.
Blandford has been involved in bookmaking for over 20 years. He started Blandford Betting in July 1984, bought a retail betting shop in the United Kingdom and over the next five years built up the business to five U.K. shops. He sold four of them in 1990 to Arthur Prince Ltd., a national operator that was subsequently bought by Coral Bookmakers.
He turned right around and reinvested the money made from the sale into the business by purchasing five more units, plus a self-contained telephone betting operation. The new operation also ran racecourse betting tracks at major U.K. horseracing tracks.
Blandford was the first operator in the United Kingdom to run an exclusively online sports book. When Internet gambling came onto the scene in the mid 1990s, the British sports betting industry was dominated by three prominent bookmakers: Ladbrokes, William Hill and Coral. The latter two were online before Blandford's business, although their Internet operations were a relatively small component of businesses drawing the bulk of their profits form terrestrial betting.
But when Blandford discovered the Internet in 1996, he recognized the potential in the technology available and took advantage of everything it had to offer.
"I think it was my training in marketing that enabled me to realize, at a fairly early stage, that here was a distribution channel-a new distribution channel-that would work for bookmaking, and huge implications to me as a retail-based bookmaker-a local bookmaker-because suddenly now I could market internationally," Blandford told IGN in 1999.
After spending a year researching the possibilities related to the Internet, Blandford sold Blandford Betting in December 1997 to the Tote. He turned his focus to his new Internet sports betting business, NetBet, which became Sportingbet in 1998. Sportingbet was the first British online bookmaker to operate completely online.
Despite all the adversity of late, Sportingbet has some recent cause for optimism. The company last week reported improved betting margins and that it expects its Paradise Poker site to attract more players in the coming months.
Sportingbet is also getting ready to launch a Spanish-language version of its poker site within a month, with a Brazil-focused site to follow. Losses sustained after the enactment the UIGEA, however, make a dividend unlikely in the year ending July 2007, McIver said.
Non-Executive Director Bob Holt is also stepping down from Sportingbet. Sean O'Connor, senior independent director, will assume the role of chairman of the audit committee, a position previously held by Holt.
Blandford could not be reached for comment.