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Chile – Slot hall operator’s appeal kicked out in Chile

By - 22 May 2017

An appeal filed by a slot parlour operator has been rejected by the Court of Appeals in the Coquimbo region in Chile.

Local company Spa lodged the appeal in protest against fines and closures by the municipal government of Ovalle arguing that it infringed upon their constitutional rights. In what could be an important development in the Chilean Gaming Control Board’s (SJC) ongoing battle against illegal gaming the court ruled unanimously, that the municipal government of Ovalle had neither acted in an arbitrary nor illegal manner when it had closed the business for offering slot machines outside of its licence to run “billiards and electronic games.”

In a statement the Second Chamber of the Court of Appeals stated that it considered that there was sufficient evidence that the establishment’s slot machines which awarded prizes in money “would not be authorised by the commercial patents held by the appellant, as confirmed by the audits of the municipal inspectors.”

The resolution adds that it should be the leasing company of electronic games, which must collect the report issued by the SJC, which will define if the electronic device on site corresponds to a gambling machine or not.

New guidelines rule that the municipalities should ask those interested in obtaining permission to operate electronic gaming machines, to obtain certification that prizes are not handed out randomly by the electronic machines on their premises. The new rules ultimately give the SJC the right to determine what constitutes random and what constitutes entertainment machines and state that only certifications issued by gaming laboratories approved by the SJC will have the capacity to verify conclusively if a machine is either a gambling machine or if the result depends on an element of skill. According to the latest rules, all gambling machines which hand out cash as prizes now have to be certified by the SJC. The court’s decision could help the SJC in its legal battle against “neighbourhood casinos” where slot machines are often present as part of small businesses such as pool halls and arcades.

Researchers taking part in a recent study commissioned by the SJC visited more than 3,000 businesses which had been granted a municipal licence to run gaming arcades and found that 1,327 of them housed machines that handed out cash prizes – something which is in direct contravention of Chile’s gaming laws, as according to federal law, slot machines may only be present in casinos.

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