FOBTs are located within retail betting outlets and offer a variety of digital versions of gambling games like roulette. Until the beginning of 2019, players could wager up to $100 per 20 seconds on the machines, which accounted for more than 50 percent of retail betting revenues.<\/p>\n
But they were labeled \u201cthe crack cocaine of the high street\u201d by critics, who argued they had a pernicious effect on society — \u201chigh street\u201d being a metonym for the UK brick-and-mortar retail sector.<\/p>\n
\n
In 2018, despite warnings of job losses and shop closures, the UK government took drastic measures, slashing the maximum stakes on the machines from \u00a3100 to \u00a32.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Some media commentators speculated that the government may have delayed implementing these reforms until January 2019. That’s because it anticipated the billion-pound hit from Betfred\u2019s taxation case and wanted to continue reaping tax revenue from higher-stakes machines.<\/p>\n
For the betting industry, which has been battered by regulatory headwinds in recent years and now faces grim profit warnings due to widespread sports cancellations, a billion-pound tax rebate is just the tonic it needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shares in Britain\u2019s leading betting companies rose\u00a0Thursday on the news that the sector is preparing to collect on a $1 billion ($1.22 billion) tax rebate. Last month, an upper tax tribunal agreed with an August 2018 lower tribunal ruling, which found that the UK government\u2019s application of a 20 percent sales tax (VAT) on fixed-odds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":136663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,1074],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
UK Betting Industry Shares Jump on \u00a31 Billion FOBT Tax Windfall<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n