Gaming zones to be made in Altay, Kaliningrad, Primorie and Krasnodar
Gaming reservations will be located in Kaliningrad region, republic of Altay, Primorie region and on the borderline territory between Rostov and Krasnodar regions.
As it was announced on Thursday, September 14th, by Sergei Tchizhov, a State Duma deputy, the State Duma Economic Policy, Business and Tourism Committee recommended adopting the legislation on making gaming zones in Russia in the second reading. The deputy said that the legislation version submitted for the second reading states that it shall come into effect on January 1st, 2007.
According to the legislation, gambling facilities with relevant licenses will be entitled to continue their operations out of gaming zones as long as till June 30th, 2009. From July 1st, 2009, as it is proposed by some deputies, any gambling facility outside a gaming zone will be thought illegal. Still a part of Russian casinos may lose their right to operate even earlier.
Deputy Tchizhov informed that the legislation now contains a regulation that empowers authorities of the RF constituent territories to ban gaming activities, including those of certain companies, within their territories. Meanwhile, as the “Novye Izvestia” newspaper reminds, a gambling facility must be quite large to meet the new norms.
By July 1st, 2007, all gambling facilities which do not meet the requirements for financial assets shall have been closed. For a casino, it is no less than 600 mln rubles with over 10 gaming tables available and with the size over 800 square metres. A slot location shall have over 50 slot machines and the minimum size of 100 square metres. It means that all small companies will have to leave the market quite promptly.
One more important clause that the legislation turns out to contain before the second reading is the ban to place gaming zones in residential areas. Before, it was supposed that two of the four areas will be zones – residential areas. And by now it’s been decided that the construction will be started from nothing anyway.
In the year 2005, tax collections from gaming business reached 21 billion rubles, of which only 8.5 million rubles are received by the federal budget, the rest of the money goes to regional ones. In Moscow, for instance, taxes received by the local treasury made 4 billion rubles. In the capital, according to the experts, there are more casinos now than in any other large city of the world but for Las Vegas and Miami. Saint-Petersburg, which takes the six place in the international rating, managed to get 2.3 billion rubles from gambling.
It is still not clear how the money will be distributed when gaming zones appear. There is a proposal to make the tax for gambling facilities a federal one, and then equally share all the money received between the regions, or to link several Russian constituent territories to one and the same zone so that no one could feel cheated out of their rightful shares.
Source: NEWSru.com