Interactive
Peru – Peru makes moves to allow online gaming
By Phil - 3 June 2015
Director General of the Peruvian Gaming Control Board Manuel San Román Benavente has announced that Peru could soon give online gaming the green light and that the gaming control board is working on a draft legislation which would permit online gaming in Peru.
According to local press reports, the tax for online gambling operators will stand between fifteen to and twenty per cent. This will be significantly higher than land based operators which currently pay 12 per cent. The reason for the difference, according to Mr. Benavente, is that casinos help create jobs locally and they also have a number of “video systems and a number of controls in place.”
Although the exact details of the new bill are unknown it is believed that any operators offering their services locally will have to have a domain name ending in .pe but servers will not necessarily have to be locally based. However the board will implement a system whereby it will be able to be monitor online transactions locally and in real time.
There have been a growing number of reports that Peru could soon address the issue of online gaming. Peru has seen of one of the most remarkable success stories in the Latin American gaming market in the last ten years. Thanks to the efforts of a newly established gaming board the gaming landscape in Peru has changed from a situation where less than four per cent of gaming operations were regulated by the government to a situation where illegal gaming has all been eradicated and where all slot machine transactions are monitored and in real time by a central government-controlled server.
Today tax income generated by the industry has increased more than threefold since 2007 and there are now 70,000 slot machines in 700 slot parlors and 22 casinos that operate throughout the nation. According to the latest statistics Gaming Revenue stands at around U$S100m a year.
