Operators see Swedish fines reduced following Court of Appeal ruling

The Swedish Court of Appeal has ordered the reduction of fines imposed by the Swedish Gambling Authority (SGA) against two operators for failure to connect to the Spelpaus self-exclusion site.

AG Communications and Genesis Global were issued with fines of SEK3m (£254,000) and SEK4m respectively for failures to connect to the site, something which is a requirement for all Swedish-licensed operators.

The operators were not connected to Spelpaus.se for 33 and nine days respectively.

In the case of AG Communications, the firm cited failures in a third-party system which prevented it from integrating with Spelpaus.

To address this, the firm manually crosschecked its records against Spelpaus listings every 10 minutes, refunding any players who had accessed its sites while being self-excluded.

However, it was later discovered that this system still allowed 34 self-excluded players to continue gambling on the Aspire Global site due to disparities in the recording of national social security numbers.

In both cases, the operators launched separate appeals against the SGA fines, arguing that mitigating circumstances and the fact that both operators had promptly connected to the Spelpaus database meant the fines were disproportionate in nature.

In considering the operators’ arguments, the Court of Appeal asserted that the failure to connect was a serious violation and that the SGA was justified in issuing a warning and fine.

Under Swedish gambling laws, penalties of a minimum SEK5,000 going up to a maximum 10% of licensee turnover during the preceding financial year can be issued by the SGA for violations.

However, the court agreed that the financial penalty issued by the SGA was “too high” and should instead be based on an assessment of the seriousness of the offence committed.

In assessing this, the court ordered both financial penalties levied to be reduced to SEK1m each.