French Gambling Update - RecentPoker.com

**I Heart Gambling Online** · 03-06-2009, 11:32 AM

Further details are emerging from Thursday's press conference in Paris on the opening up of the French gambling market .

Budget minister Eric Woerth told reporters at the conference that France will open its gambling market to competition and begin to grant online betting licenses in 2010, seeking to stem 'illegal' gambling and safeguard billions of Euros in tax revenue provided by the industry each year.

The minister said the gambling market in France would be expanded to adapt "to Internet reality" and help France "get out of an unsustainable situation in which the state is losing a growing part of the betting market," the International Herald Tribune reported.

France has been under mounting pressure from the European Commission to open up its state monopolised gambling market in compliance with EU principles.

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