Interactive

Colombia – Colombia to offer additional 20 online gaming licences

By Phil - 10 January 2018

President of Coljuegos Juan B. Pérez Hidalgo has announced plans to grant as many as 20 new online gambling licences in Colombia this year.

According to Pérez, many foreign companies have shown their interest in investing in Colombia now that Colombia has updated and tightened its online gaming laws.

Mr. Pérez said: “We have had several applications put before Coljuegos to request operating permits. To give you an example, only for online games we expect to have twenty operators in 2018.”

Pérez added that the Russian World Cup in 2018 would inevitably provide a huge boost to betting online.
Pérez said that since new regulations had come into effect, more than 150 thousand operations had been registered and that combined they have generated more than $4bn pesos in licensing rights, which have been allocated to the Colombian health system.

The President of Coljuegos added that in 2017 funds for the state broke records as transfers exceeded $ 465,393 million, an increase of 19 per cent over the same period in 2016 when the agency transferred $ 392,393 million to state coffers.

Online gaming laws began to be tightened after legislation was passed in 2016. According to new regulations, operators granted a licence must adhere to a number of strict obligations and meet the technical requirements as per the terms granted to it by the state. Meanwhile, Coljuegos with the help of the National Police has continued to manage the blocking of unauthorised web pages.

In December, it was announced that the board had granted Codere Colombia S.A an online licence. With the new agreement with Codere now in place there are now five sites that are authorised to offer online gaming in Colombia. These are wplay.co, betplay.com.co, colbet.co and zamba.co and codere.com.co.