Lawmakers in the Eastern European nation of Armenia have been considering legislation that could further restrict gambling establishments. As expected, not everyone is happy about this development. Last Wednesday, for instance, a group of employees from some of the country’s gambling operators gathered outside the parliament building in Yerevan to protest against the piece of legislation that is being championed by the Standing Committee on Economic Affairs.
Among the things that the new legislation is proposing is a ban that is to impose on the sports betting operators beginning November 2020. According to the authors of the new bill, the entire legislative initiative is geared towards tackling gambling activities in the country.
Tackling Gambling at the Expense of Jobs
The controversial legislation which was announced in October 2018 has been criticized by a number of stakeholders with many of them pointing out how short-sighted the move is. If it implemented, the bill will just be latest in a series of increasingly strict regulations that have been imposed on Armenia gambling facilities over the last twenty years.
This latest bill would involve the complete removal of all land-based casinos including betting parlors and this will render several thousands of people jobless. One of the gaming companies that is set to lay off most employees will be Goodwin Bet LLC which currently operates hundreds of physical betting parlors across the state.
Sarkis Mikaelyan the chief executive of Goodwin Bet LLC has recently requested for a one-year delay while criticizing the parliament’s harsh tone in advancing the bill that he believes will put him out of business and, as mentioned earlier, will leave several thousands of people without jobs.
Some of the other betting facilities in the country are likely to take fewer hits in this regard especially because a decent number of them have already made the switch from land-based establishments to online portals.
Misplaced Priorities?
Needless to say, gambling has become a major socio-economic issue for Armenia – the country’s desperate and impoverished people are lured to the activity by promises of riches and, more often than not, they end up losing their life savings to bad luck. In fact, it is safe to say that the addiction is destroying families in the country – it as even been linked to the increasing cases of suicide.
Even so, a major concern with the newly proposed bill is that it is targeting the wrong sort of gambling institution. Case in point, there are tougher penalties on underage gambling and the gamblers are required to present their IDs before being allowed to enter the land-based gambling facilities – these were mostly implemented a year ago. On the flipside, the online gambling space, according to critics, is not entirely subject to these same restrictions. Perhaps parliament really needs to reconsider how it approaches the situation since this might just result in a shift to the online gambling space.
