The Italian Budget Law for 2015 has been finally published in the Official Journal on December 29th, 2014 and entered into force since January 1st, 2015.
As anticipated in a previous post (please refer to previous Egla post: “Which future for gambling in Italy with such Budget bill ?”), the major State revenue to come from the land based gambling sector has been confirmed in the voted bill although the initial one billion Euros per year deriving from an increase of AWP and VLT gaming machines taxation now turned in an overall 500 million Euros annual contribution.
The Budget Law states the additional contribution anticipates a detailed reordering of the gambling sector and notably AWP and VLT licensees and supply chain considerations that will be provided within the implementing measures of the Fiscal Delegation Law (please refer to previous post: The Fiscal Delegation Law and its potential impact on gambling in Italy”).
According to the Budget Law, each licensee will contribute to the annual contribution amount with a share proportionate to the number of machines that can be referred to it on December 31st, 2014 meaning by this that these were connected to the central system in the last Accounting period of 2014, thus reversing part of the collection net of the winnings earned within its supply chain.
Although this contribution has already entered into force , it has still to be concretely implemented according to the Italian gambling Authority (ADM) provisions to be issued within next January 15th , at latest. In particular, ADM will calculate the number of gaming machines per licensees for the current year and therefore establish the proportional share and the payment modalities of the additional contribution April and October installments.
Interestingly, the Budget Law provides for the AWP and VLT licensee to redistribute within its supply chain operators the remaining consideration through a renegotiation of the relevant agreement and its compulsory execution in order for the operator to receive its consideration.
Therefore, while AWP and VLT licensees will be compelled to pay in advance the additional contribution to the State, it is not to exclude the supply chain operators will challenge this compulsory negotiation of their consideration agreements before the Courts.
This uncertain scenario is heavily disadvantaging the legal land based sector and there is therefore a concrete urge of the awaited above-mentioned gambling reform reordering in order to maintain its sustainability.
Besides, the Budget Law contains other important gambling provisions aimed to, among others, contrast the illegal gambling land based offer through Data Transmission Centers and introduce the possibility to review taxation and payout through a specific Finance Ministry decree for those gambling products that suffered a loss equal or more than 15% of their collection and State revenue in the last three years. The details of these provisions will be examined in further posts.
