SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Olga Sanchez Cordero, Secretary of Governance of Mexico (SEGOB), has disclosed that Leonel Cota Montaño has been appointed as the Secretary-General of gambling supervisory department ‘Dirección General de Juegos y Sorteos’ (Games & Lotteries Mexico).
A Labour Party (PT) political veteran, Cota Montaño is the former governor of the state of Baja California Sur (1999-2005) and will take leadership of Mexican gambling regulatory affairs from March 2019.
The department of Direccion General de Juegos is supervised by SEGOB, and is charged with issuing the necessary permits to operate Mexican gambling and lottery concessions, working in collaboration with individual state governments.
Mexican gambling continues to operate under a fragmented framework, in which SEGOB oversees federal laws, but individual state assemblies are charged with issuing provincial licences and taxation.
Despite SEGOB efforts, Mexico’s ‘Federal Gaming Law’ was last updated in 2012, with the government simply adding basic provisions for regulating slot machines.
2019 saw ministers of the co-governing MORENA Party proposition a draft mandate to overhaul Mexico’s gambling framework, ‘transferring all gambling laws to the federal government’.
Publishing its mandate, MORENA ministers stated that ‘provincial autonomy’ on gambling taxation and tax collection had failed and needed to be supervised by SEGOB’s authority.
Bolstering Mexico’s tax capacity has been marked as a core directive of the PT-MORENA coalition alliance, which in 2019 launched its flagship ‘CoDi’ mandate seeking to bolster Mexican digital and business infrastructures.
