The French Government has given up its project to legalize online casinos, an idea that sought to increase tax revenue, but which had been highly criticized by associations against gambling addiction and traditional casinos.
The government plan to include an amendment in this regard in the draft State Budget for 2025 has been parkedThe Budget Minister, Antoine Saint-Martin, said this Saturday in radio statements.
“I think there is a need for concertation” with other ministerial departments potentially affected, “I think “We must first work among ourselves,” has acknowledged, without referring to the criticism generated by the project.
Saint-Martin recalled that the Government wanted to approve this authorization for supervise and control online gamblingwhich is already practiced irregularly with entities located abroad.
According to the French Gaming Association, The French gamble between 850 and 1.5 billion euros a year illegally online through entities outside the country, many of them in the Caribbean tax haven of Curaçao.
The possibility of authorizing online gambling had generated unanimous reviews of land-based casinos, who had warned of the loss of activity (and with it, tax revenue for the State) and also of thousands of jobs in the sector.
Furthermore, organizations fighting and preventing gambling addiction had warned of the danger of increasing mental problems and economic consequences derived from gambling addiction.
47.2% of French people participated in games of chance in 2019 and 6% of them had problemsaccording to a study by the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT).
In 2022, almost 5,000 compulsive gamblers asked for help to the SOS Joueurs organization.
On the other hand, the discussion of the Budget project in the National Assembly will pause next week and will continue next November 5Saint-Martin added.
Until now, the Government, which does not have a parliamentary majority, has suffered some defeats in the discussion of the amendmentssuch as the rejection of increasing taxes on non-electrified vehicles or the vote in favor of creating a tax on the wealth of billionaires.
However, the Executive keeps up its sleeve the possibility of approve the Budget without a parliamentary voterelying on article 49.3 of the Constitution, although this would almost automatically expose him to a motion of censure.
For now, both Prime Minister Michel Barnier and other members of the Executive They have rejected that they are going to resort to that possibility.
