Aspire Global and Genesis Global to pay reduced Swedish fines
Operators win appeals against SGA fines for Spelpaus failings
Aspire Global and Genesis Global will pay reduced fines in Sweden totalling SEK3.5m (£284,000) after the operators won their respective appeals against the Swedish Gambling Authority (SGA).
In hearings at the Swedish Administrative Court in Linköping, the firms had both sought to get their respective fines reduced to a formal warning with no financial penalty.
However, the Administrative Court said the nature of the violations were serious enough to impose administrative fines on both operators.
As a result, Aspire Global has had its penalty reduced by a third to SEK2m, while Genesis Global will now pay SEK1.5m, SEK2.5m less than was originally handed down.
Despite this, the court ruled that while the fines were correct, the high fines levied were not consistent with other cases of this type and ordered the fines to be reduced.
The court also questioned why the fines were calculated on turnover rather than net sales, when gaming turnover is not formally defined in Swedish law.
“In the absence by a clear definition, the Gaming Inspectorate should not have chosen it theoretically maximum basis for calculating the penalty fee, but for legal security reasons instead, the net sales form the basis for the calculation,” the court said.
Aspire Global received a SEK3m fine (£247,000) in April, after the SGA claimed the operator had failed to connect to the Spelpaus national self-exclusion database by 1 January as required under the Swedish Gaming Act.
Investigators found that 34 players could still access the site during the period 1-8 January, despite having self-excluded via Spelpaus. At the time the company cited failures in a third-party system, moving to a manual checking method before rectifying the database issues on 15 January.
Genesis Global received a SEK4m (£330,000) fine in March for failing to connect to the database in the period 1-9 January. Investigators found that 76 self-excluded players were still able to access its site within this period.