As from the beginning of 2009, the Belgium National Lottery will be offering draw games such as Lotto, Keno or the Euromillions to net surfers. The announcement was made by Didier Reynders, the Finance Minister, to the daily Sud-Presse. “It’s undeniable that money games are booming on the Internet. Well, presently, most of the online gaming companies are located overseas,” noted the Minister.

Nine European nations are mulling plans to create a cross-border lottery with punters to be lured by a jackpot that rolls up higher from week to week, a German lottery official informed. Klaus Sattler, spokesman for the Baden Wuerttemberg state lottery commission, said in Stuttgart, „It’s true there are talks among several European lotteries on creating a joint, jackpot-oriented game.“

European online gaming companies may soon be able to legally advertise their services in Sweden, following last week’s Supreme Court order that the Court of Appeal must hear the cases against two of the country daily newspapers, Aftonbladet and Expressen. The Supreme Court said that several rulings in the European Court of Justice have brought Sweden’s Lottery Law into doubt…

A speaker of Deutscher Lotto- und Totoblock, Klaus Sattler, confirmed a report by Bild, the biggest German tabloid, about plans to start the largest European lottery ever. Sattler confirmed this weekend: „It is true that several European lottery operators are considering to start a jackpot oriented game.“ Bild reported that EuroLotto would offer jackpots of much more than 100 million Euros. According to Sattler, these plans will be discussed with the supervisory authorities of the states and the Academic Advisory Board…

According to Bild, the biggest German newspaper, the German state gaming operators want to refresh old plans to start a super lottery with jackpots of a least 10 million Euros and with a chance to win more than 100 million Euros. The plans disappeard, while the new Interstate Treaty on Gambling was discussed, but now seem to be retracked very seriously after the Treaty was signed into law. According to the newspaper article, the state operators want to file applications with the gaming authorities in April and hope to start the new lottery in autumn.

The Turkish Government finally has set its National Lottery, Milli Piyango, in the display window for the (pre-) privatization. The Government has reconfirmed that Ernst & Young, and for the technical gambling facets, QLot Consultants, will assist the Turkish Privatization Authority (IPA) to realize this great ambition.
 Plans to privatize the National Lottery were already discussed under the administration of Turgut Özal in 1985, but so far has been too hot a political potato to be actually consumed.



Lottery contributions to good causes could rise by nearly USD 98 million a year after the Treasury said it was re-examining the way it is taxed. The current system sees USD 0.23 in every lottery dollar go to the Treasury, paid as a set proportion of total sales. But the Treasury confirmed it was considering whether to shift to a gross profits tax system, a tax regime used in other parts of the leisure industry.

Several companies that in recent weeks announced online lottery initiatives with counterparts in China are halting operations pending more clarity on their overall legality in the wake of a statement this week from the Ministry Of Information Industry and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). Proposed new regulations set to go into affect at the end of the month have been designed to crack down on the explosion of audio-visual content on the Internet.

China is expected to issue its first national regulation on the supervision of the fast-growing lottery industry next year to stamp out fraud, which has been on the rise since the country launched its first lottery two decades ago. Legislators will draw on the experience of other countries and regions to work out the regulation. Legislators will also make explicit stipulations about each aspect of lotteries, such as the distribution…

Berlin (Reuters) – Millions of people are crowding into German shops to fill out lottery forms in hopes of winning Wednesday’s record 43 million euro (30.6 million pounds) jackpot. Lottery officials said on Tuesday that thousands of foreigners from neighbouring countries France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Austria and Switzerland were also streaming across the border to buy tickets.

Penn National Gaming announced that it has filed a license application with the Kansas Lottery Commission to be considered as a Lottery Gaming Facility Manager at a proposed destination casino resort in Sumner County that the company has budgeted at USD 365 million. The second phase expansion will bring the total budget for the master-planned project to over USD 565 million.

London/Munich, November 9, 2007: Lotteries are increasingly interested in benchmarking and success factors. And as the retail channel still dominates the global lottery market, retail benchmarks and success factors are the ones many eyes are foremost turning to. Key results of MECN’s new lottery benchmarking study: retail strategies differ significantly and many European lottery monopolists employ a much less aggressive retail strategy than is sometimes alleged.