Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

More than 12% of Malta's GDP is from online gaming [0]. Countless online casinos advertise in other European countries, but are located in Malta due to more relaxed rules and lower taxes.

[0] https://calvinayre.com/2017/11/22/business/malta-gambling-bi...

View on HN

Malta is also passing a large amount of cryptocurrency focused legislation. They and Liechtenstein want to be the blockchain capitals of Europe.

How does Malta's regulation help?

I presume if you want to accept German players u need to conform to German rules. So how do these online casinos operate inside the EU ?

EDIT: also note that Malta population is 500K. So even one large unicorn can shift the economy numbers.

Companies in Malta are subject to Maltese supervision, and thanks to the EU the companies can operate in the rest of the EU as well. There's probably some extra rules they need to follow in each country, I don't know the details.

The Maltese economy is full of money laundering, tax evasion [1, 2], mafia [3], and other gray areas [4, 5] anyway. This article is a puff piece in the travel section, so it's hardly the place for mentioning of the Panama papers or journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia that was investigating online gambling and corruption was killed by a car bomb in 2017 [6].

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/gambling_en

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/dodgy-gaming-bu...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40026826

[3] https://www.occrp.org/en/thedaphneproject/how-maltese-online...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/16/tax-evasion...

[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-11/why-the-e...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia

Reply on news.ycombinator.com