Hellenic Gaming Commission Executive President, Evgenios Giannakopoulos, stated that the amount of money gained from illegal gambling in Greece exceeds the amount of money made from the country’s legal market. The Greek legal gaming market’s profits has shown a decline of about 35 percent from 2009 to 2013, dropping from 8.7 billion euros to 5.5 billions respectively. A decline was also recorded in gross profits where 1.5 billion euros were made in 2013 compared to 2.5 billion in 2009.
Official data released by the Greek Commission for the Supervision and Control of Games (EEEP) has shown that profits from 60,000 to 100,000 illegal gambling machines are estimated to have reached an amount of four to five billion euros in profits. These machines are located in non-licensed gambling spots and their gross profits are estimated to reach 1.5 billion. These measures exclude online gambling, where a turnover of 1 billion is also estimated to have taken place in 2013.”
Evgenios Giannakopoulos also highlighted the fact that OPAP is still the Greek monopoly gambling operator. He also noted that the Greek Government has taken new measures to fight money laundering by focusing on the creation of an electronic identity mechanism.
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