Exchange betting specialists Betfair has been granted two online gambling licenses by Bulgaria‘s State Gambling Commission (SGC). As of this week, the Betfair.bg site is authorized to offer sports betting (including exchange wagering) as well as wagers on horse and dog racing. Betfair also received a separate license to take online casino and poker action. Local sports betting operator Eurofootball.bg also received the nod to take online sports and racing wagers.
The announcement follows last week’s awarding of an online casino license to online poker giant PokerStars, who joined Malta-based efbet.com and Bulgarian sports lottery operator Sports Toto as the only other firms on the list of approved operators. The floodgates of Bulgarian applicants is expected to continue flowing ever since the country’s parliamentarians bit the bullet in December and approved a dramatic reduction in the tax rates online gambling operators were expected to contribute to government coffers.
In keeping with this new spirit of rational behavior, the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance also just updated its annual license fees for all things gambling. Operators wishing to work in the online realm need to ante up a quite reasonable BGN 50k (US $35k) while land-based casino operators get off by paying BGN 10k and all other organizers of games of chance need only scrape up BGN 5k.
But just as Santa makes naughty and nice lists, the SGC has also added another five domain names to its burgeoning blacklist of online gambling sites not authorized to take wagers from Bulgarian punters. The fab five are: Alderney-licensed bgo.com, Curacao-licensed mobibet.com, Isle of Man-licensed novibet.com, Malta-licensed goalwin.com and Bet365 offshoot sportgiochi365.com.
