Portugal May Be the Next EU Country With Legal Online Poker

After several seemingly purposeful delays (online gambling legislation has been kicking around the Portuguese parliament for several years now), the Portuguese parliament will finally be taking a look at a potential online gambling bill draft that was recently approved by the Ministry of Economics.

The Portuguese parliament will now have until July 10th to debate the bill and give it the official thumbs up or thumbs down before they break for summer recess.

According to PokerFuse.com the tax rate for the proposed bill would be between 15% and 20% on foreign operators.

Like most other countries, Portugal’s online gaming industry would also be ring-fenced.

What the bill would do

The proposed bill is incredibly comprehensive in its aims, as it seeks to legalize not only online poker, but online sports-betting and casino games as well. The goal is to see if the online gaming bill combined with several other measures will be enough to close the country’s budgetary gap and raise additional tax revenue for Portugal, which is still trying to climb out of the recession that began in 2008.

In fact, Portugal was led down the online gambling road by their creditors, the IMF, the EU, and the ECB as a way for the country to repay the entities that gave them a bailout.

Other EU markets with legal online gaming

Portugal is part of what I’ll call the third wave of EU countries looking to legalize online gambling as a ring-fenced market — a ring-fenced market is the European version of intra-state online poker in the US, where players must be located within the country to be able to participate.

Setting aside the UK which was the trailblazer on the online gambling front and operates as part of the global online gambling community, the first wave of legalized (ring-fenced) markets in Europe came in 2010 when both Italy (after passing an iGaming bill way back in 2006 and years of fighting to make it a reality) and France launched legalized online poker within months of one another.

Italy and France were soon followed by countries ranging from Spain to Belgium in a second wave, and now several other stragglers are coming along (some kicking and screaming) as well such as parts of Germany, the Netherlands, and potentially Portugal.