Gibraltar Government To Talk To Bookmakers After Budget Blow

Panorama

13 March 2001

This story has been reproduced by kind permission of Panorama at: http://www.panorama.gi

The Gibraltar government will be holding discussions "within the next few weeks" with UK bookmakers established in Gibraltar, following the British government decision to scrap betting tax. Bookmakers had left the UK precisely to avoid the tax that will be no longer there from the beginning of next year.

Trade and Industry Minister Keith Azopardi said that betting was not a mainstay of the economy. They would be talking to them to clarify the position of each of the nine bookmakers on the Rock.

He discarded this was a crisis scenario as some people had been saying.

Opposition leader Joe Bossano said the government had described the arrival of the bookmakers as the most important economic development in recent years. What they cannot do, he said, is seek the political credit when they came and then say it is not their fault if they go.

The UK decision was not a surprise as it had been the subject of informed speculation over several months. The UK chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown has made the move on the understanding that the bookmakers will relocate back to Britain.

First estimates suggest that 200 jobs could go.

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