SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
LeoVegas AB has launched an appeal against the SEK 2 million penalty (€200,000) issued by Swedish gambling inspectorate Spelinspektionen related to “shortcomings in the work against money laundering and terrorist financing”.
Spelinspektionen communicated that LeoVegas had failed to comply in ensuring the risk-based AML safeguards of Sweden’s ‘Money Laundering Act’.
The penalty notice specified that LeoVegas had failed to ‘risk classify its customers’ and has further presented ‘unsatisfactory documentation’ of AML measures undertaken to protect its customers.
As a result, Spelinspektionen fined LeoVegas SEK 2 million, stating that its business had been exposed to AML and terrorist financing threats.
LeoVegas has denied the charge outright, issuing a response arguing that Spelinspektion had only reviewed its AML frameworks once during 2019.
The Stockholm-listed online gambling group, which operates the Swedish-licensed domains of gogocasino.com and leovegas.com, announced its intention to appeal the Spelinspektionen judgement.
“LeoVegas is continually developing its policies to ensure compliance, and had already, before today’s decision, changed and updated its customer due diligence routines,” it said.
“LeoVegas intends to appeal today’s decision in order to allow a court to review the matter and give the entire industry further guidance on how the current regulation is to be interpreted.”
