Malta ranks high in the preferences of gambling operators and there are good reasons why this tiny nation in the Mediterranean is preferred. A haven for online game providers Over the last two decades, the number of casino gambling operators like fruityking.co.uk and software providers that chose Malta grew at a steady pace.

The small island of Malta is home to almost 300 invisible casinos. If each had a bricks-and-mortar presence, the country would be knee-deep in gamblers. But it’s not. There are just four physical gaming establishments, and fewer visible bookmakers than in Italy or Spain.

• Online Gambling Regulations. Remote gambling in Malta is regulated by the Remote Gaming Regulations, 2004 issued under the Lotteries and Other Games Act 2001 (LOGA). The regulatory body in Malta supervising online gambling operations is the Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LGA).
• All online casinos in the country are regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority, which requires operators to apply directly to them for a license. Applying for a license is an 11-step process, within which operators must supply financial information, a thorough run-down of the games available and more.
• Online Gambling Regulations. Remote gambling in Malta is regulated by the Remote Gaming Regulations, 2004 issued under the Lotteries and Other Games Act 2001 (LOGA). The regulatory body in Malta supervising online gambling operations is the Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LGA).

The others are remote gaming companies that are based in Malta but serve clients far afield. The industry took off here after 2004, when the government, led by then-Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi of the Nationalist Party, introduced the first online gaming regulations in the European Union (EU).

The decision quickly paid off. Today, Malta hosts one of the highest concentrations of online gaming license-holders in the EU, and the industry now rakes in €1.2 billion (US$ 1.4 billion) in annual earnings on the island, making up 12 percent of Malta’s GDP. The hundreds of gaming companies were lured in by the country’s low-tax regime and by the opportunity to obtain operating licenses that allow them to conduct business across the EU’s 28 member states. But Malta’s capacity to effectively police this industry has since become a source of worry for law enforcement across Europe.

This explosive growth of online gambling was of great interest to Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia before she was killed by a car bomb last October. The Daphne Project, a consortium of 18 news organizations from 15 countries, including the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), a partner of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), has been working for the past five months to complete Caruana Galizia’s work.

In following up on her interest in online gambling, reporters have pieced together a disturbing picture.

The industry’s success has come at a high price. For the past decade, Italian investigators have been looking into how various mafia organizations have exploited Maltese online gaming to make and launder large amounts of money. They found repeated instances of criminal infiltration and a lack of effective oversight by the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA), which regulates the industry. The latest anti-mafia operations also reveal how the lucrative Maltese online gaming licenses change hands from one criminal group to another.

Maltese-registered operators are allowed to set up betting shops in any EU country, as long as the computer terminals are linked to servers in Malta. In theory, there are safeguards to prevent abuses: They are only supposed to provide access to websites where customers log into their own accounts, using their own funds, and play games directly.

In practice, when controlled by organized crime, online gaming systems can essentially function as ATMs for criminals. This is the conclusion reached by anti-mafia prosecutors in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, who in February 2018 cracked down on a vast Maltese gambling network allegedly linked to families belonging to the Cosa Nostra, Sicily’s infamous mafia organization.

“The interest of Cosa Nostra in online gambling started in about 2013-2014,” Sergio Macaluso, a Cosa Nostra affiliate turned police informant after his November 2017 arrest, told investigators. “They infiltrated the sector by making deals with the owners of betting websites, many of whom are set up in Malta because it guarantees a more favorable tax regime.”

In Malta, IRPI discovered that online gambling businesses continue to operate even after their licenses have been suspended. In at least one case, they have been assisted by a “fiduciary” (a legal entity which manages assets on another’s behalf) created by a former MGA official, one of a number of such organizations which help criminals obtain licenses and hide behind secretive corporations.

In its quest to become the gambling hub of Europe, Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote, Malta left the doors open to abuse.

From Sicily with Cash

A hundred kilometers of water separates Valletta, Malta’s seaside capital, and Pozzallo, a town on Sicily’s southern tip. The town is frequently in the headlines as a port of arrival for migrant boats, but it is also the point of departure for ferries bound to Malta.

In early April 2015, Vincenzo Romeo boarded one of those ferries. Romeo is the nephew of Nitto Santapaola, a Cosa Nostra boss. The clan under his leadership, the Santapaola, rules the island’s Catania province.

Described by Italian investigators as a rising star of the Sicilian Mafia, Romeo is the poster child for a new breed of mobsters: educated, cosmopolitan and eager for new business opportunities. Romeo knew that he could make millions with online gambling, but his family’s criminal past meant that he would never get clearance from the Italian authorities. That, investigators say, is why he headed to Malta — with €38,000 in cash.

His contact on the island was Massimo ‘Nunzio’ Lagana, an old acquaintance who, like Romeo, hailed from the Sicilian city of Messina. In Italy, Lagana was known for his checkered past: He had featured in criminal investigations into illegal gambling and Mafia ties since the mid-2000s. But in Malta, he represents himself as a successful gaming impresario. He collaborated with Planetwin365, one of the island’s largest online operators, to organize live poker tournaments at the Portomaso Casino in the exclusive Saint Julian’s Bay area.

Thanks to his high profile, Lagana became well-connected in the local gaming sector. According to an Italian arrest warrant seen by IRPI, he was able to hunt down developers who could create an online casino that would meet all of Romeo’s requirements.

From conversations wiretapped by Italian police, it emerged that a Slovenian man based in Malta was the technical mastermind of the operation. At Lagana’s request — and with the €38,000 in compensation — he allegedly created a series of online gambling platforms and licensed them to Romeo, who then installed them on computer terminals in betting shops and bars across Sicily.

Typically, online gambling operates by linking players’ accounts to their credit cards or to online payment systems like Emoney or Skrill. These transactions are, in theory, traceable by regulators. But in Italy, most players go in person to betting shops and place their bets — and collect their winnings — in cash. This is illegal without the proper license from Italian authorities, but it is widely tolerated. And it opens up a world of possibilities that Romeo — among other operators — was keen to exploit.

Investigators in such cases say that, rather than letting their customers log in with personal online gambling accounts, betting shop proprietors would set up a single account for all their customers to use. The cash generated when players placed bets was pooled in the shop’s account, making it impossible to trace individual bets.

According to sources from the illegal gambling industry, once a month, someone working for the mafia clans would come by and pick up their share of the cash from the Italian betting shop. Most of the money would then be laundered through banks in Italy and elsewhere, while a portion would be sent to Malta to pay middlemen to keep the operation going.

In other cases, mobsters used methods that were harder to trace: loading the cash into a random player’s online account in Italy, and then pulling it out in another country; or, for very large sums, employing a fiduciary to pick up the cash and transport it to safe accounts in Switzerland, Malta, or other locations.

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These widely used systems help the criminal organizations evade Italian regulators, who struggle to block their spread and to recoup tax payments.

Another advantage of the setup is that it allows mobsters to add streams of cash from their other operations — like drug smuggling or extortion — to the gambling proceeds as needed, allowing these funds, too, to be laundered.

In July 2017, Romeo and Lagana were arrested in the Sicilian city of Messina on charges of mafia-type association and illegal gambling as part of a vast anti-mafia probe. A lawyer for Massimo Lagana told reporters that his client “has nothing to do with the crimes alleged by prosecutors” and that he will prove his innocence in court.

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Unscathed by the investigation, the Slovenian creator of the websites continues his operations in Malta, running an operation licensed by the MGA that develops gaming websites.