About this app
What is Hey Sushi?
African iGaming Alliance (AiA) CEO Peter Kesitilwe hopes the inaugural Africa Safer Gambling Week is the start of a new era for collaboration across the continent’s licensed sector.
The AiA hosted the first Africa Safer Gambling Week this week, bringing together stakeholders such as regulators, operators and industry associations on a range of issues relating to safer gambling.
As Kesitilwe explains, a key theme of the week has been turning conversations on safer gambling into practical actions.
How to play Hey Sushi
In March, William Hill told staff it plans to permanently close approximately 200 of its retail shops in the UK, around 15% of Evoke’s retail estate.
Last month, meanwhile, Betfred announced plans to shutter 132 of its UK betting shops, reducing its workforce by over 600 employees.
Betfred CEO Jo Whittaker said: “We have tried hard to protect all our sites and the colleagues who work in them, but the combined impact of higher employer National Insurance contributions, wage inflation, increases in gambling taxes and wider economic uncertainty has left us with no choice.”
What is Hey Sushi?
Operators and companies linked to them are also prohibited from acquiring, licensing, or exploiting rights to sporting events held in the country. In the area of administrative penalties, the rapporteur’s text incorporates the new infractions into the existing sanctions system in Law 14.790 of 2023, which provides for fines of up to BRL2 billion ($392.8 million).
One of the main changes made by Vieira is the creation of the crime of promoting unauthorised betting operators. The penalty is one to five years imprisonment. This may be increased by one-sixth to two-thirds when the promotion is done by a digital influencer, athlete, or well-known person, due to their greater ability to reach the public.
The rapporteur also added a rule designed to prevent the immediate movement of professionals between companies in the sector and bodies responsible for authorising, classifying, regulating and overseeing betting. Anyone who has maintained a significant link with an operator or representative entity of the market will be barred, for 24 months, from assuming certain regulatory functions. A quarantine period of the same duration will also apply in the reverse movement, for the transition from the regulatory body to the private sector.
