A Bet on the President
It refers to the extension of closure of all suchlike facilities and their relocation to four specially designated zones. As the RBC Daily found out, the corresponding petition of the Inter-Regional Trade Union of Gaming Business Employees will be sent to Dmitriy Medvedev today.
The text of the petition (available in the editorial office) stresses the fact that currently the level of social tension in labour collectives of the gambling sector is really high. “Spearheaded by labour collectives of the Russian gaming business, a meeting of gambling organizations and enterprises` representatives took place in Moscow. At the meeting an opinion was voiced that the law adopted in 2006 is absolutely correct in its essence. However, it was also noted that big and unsolvable social problems are coming to a head avalanche-like,” the document says.
By July 1st, 2009, when, pursuant to the law “On state regulation of activities involved in gambling organization and arrangement”, all gambling facilities located outside the special zones of Primorie, Altay, Krasnodar and Kaliningrad regions will have to be closed, the infrastructure of the above-mentioned regions will not have been ready yet. “De facto there is nothing in the gaming zones yet. And one of them, in Primorie, does not exist even on paper,” the RBC Daily was informed by the first Vice President of the Gambling Operators` Association Valeriy Milov. “The Federal Law is being fulfilled only halfway, insofar as gambling facilities are about to close.”
In the opinion of Mr Milov, not only the business insiders are to blame for the current situation. The failure to fulfill the law needs detailed investigation. “If the situation remains unchanged, about 500 thousand people directly employed in the gaming business and in firms working in ancillary industries will replenish the ranks of the unemployed, being unable to find another job soon,” says the petition of the Gambling Employees` Trade Union to Dmitriy Medvedev. Socially unprotected categories – cooks, drivers, etc. – are referred to first of all.
The President`s attention is also being drawn to the fact that the closed legal gambling facilities will be immediately replaced with illegal ones. Therefore the adoption of the law which aims at fight against criminalization of the society will eventually play into the hands of criminals. Subsequent drawing the business out of the shadow by force will require involvement of significant resources which the state is already lacking. “In all the regions the revenue part of the budgets is being cut down now. In July the revenues will completely miss the gambling tax as it is regional. Without this money the budgets of some regions will turn from surplus to deficit,” supposes Mr Milov.
RBC