transparency is essential. It’s important even for the purpose of appealing a fine if you want to appeal a fine. But on the other hand, it can’t go to the to the extreme, where you are essentially being a regulator, you’re essentially being unfair with compliant operators, who have a culture of compliance and are not just compliant because they are afraid of the consequences. Because you are allowing others who are more adventurous to calculate whether it’s worth the risk or not. JN: Carl’s, absolutely right. Just look at other areas of law, say something like worker’s compensation, where you have a statutory scheme, where if there’s an injury to an arm, the maximum penalty might be $10,000 that ends up being the cost of poor health and safety. Whereas under a discretionary scheme it may be some millions of dollars. That sort of prescriptive criteria would never work. It comes down to the fact there must be elements of discretion, taking into account whether it’s statutory factors, which are relevant like anti money laundering, that’s quite well defined in respect of statutes in our jurisdiction, but a lot these be led to the relevant circumstances that you’re looking at. NN: As somebody that’s advised a number of people who’ve gone through enforcement proceedings with regulators, both in the UK and elsewhere, if you cannot establish how the regulator has quantified the seriousness of the breach, so as to reach the initial value of the penalty, which may be increased or decreased according to aggravating and mitigating factors, it makes advising operators as to whether and how to resist enforcement proceedings, whether to appeal it very difficult, indeed. I think that the more that these fines are escalated, the more important it is that regulators are able to give at least some insight as to how they calculated the initial sum that they’re proposing to levy. P-PG: If you look at what happened in Sweden recently, where some hefty fines were overturned by the courts because the Swedish regulator misunderstood the law, according to the courts. And the these were, you know, quite big fines over advertising or on bonuses or whatever. I don’t know the details there in terms of gross revenue. Rene Jansen, the chairman of the Dutch gambling authority, who will be here tomorrow said in one of his columns, that aside from handing out fines that are hard and punitive, there is also another free option that every regulator has, which is to give out a warning, which comes before giving a fine. He considered that that may work better than handing out a fine straightaway which is an interesting notion, of course, especially, also taking into account the number of fines that were handed out. In fairness, most fines were handed out to offshore operators that were clearly not licensed in the Netherlands. So they were probably not answering their mail or call. NN: One issue which is relevant, which has been brought up throughout all of these comments, and I think, principally around what Jamie described earlier on, regarding the logic and the thought process, around the size of the fines and whether or not they’re going to be effective, is the issue of enforcement. It’s quite often misunderstood that administrative penalties are enforceable under, for example, European law. But that’s not the case. Peter-Paul, we were discussing this earlier. What’s the situation in Netherlands? P-PG: Fines come under, let’s say, administrative statutes. So they use the administrative law in the Netherlands to hand out fines, to give out licenses, etc. And, in a number of cases, even within the European Union, it has been really hard to execute the fines that they passed to companies that were registered elsewhere. And that’s because these fines are not under the execution section in the treaty. I’m not an expert in this, but it has been explained to me like this, and I was quite interested to hear Benjamin mention that there is a section in the Criminal Code in Germany, on the basis of which you can pass fines, because I saw that as a possible solution for the KSA if it would be under the criminal or the penal code and it becomes a criminal offense, then it would become easier to execute. NN: Bernard, would that be the case, depending on the nature of the provision that you were seeking to enforce against, would you be pursuing criminal powers or administrative? BS: No, we as GDL have no powers under criminal law, but in this case, it was an influencer in Germany. So, it was very easy. In other cases, it will be very different difficult for us because the operator will be abroad. So, the state authority has not the opportunity to get the money. So, we really suggest that the better way is payment blocking and in the same way, IP blocking in Germany. And so we also suggest that it is better to revoke permission if there’s a
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