About this app
About Seamen
The Lalabet case, which reached a milestone in June, saw a Dutch court rule largely in favour of the lottery operator.
It found Lalabet’s operators and directors had acted unlawfully by targeting Dutch players and ordered them to cease activities and provide detailed ownership and shareholder information.
The court also explored potential liabilities for trust administrators and local representatives who facilitate illegal gambling sites.
How to play Seamen
While the intention is to protect vulnerable households and ensure welfare is spent on essential needs, proposed measures are being complicated by legal, technical and privacy obstacles.
Harris Tsangarides, executive director of the Gaming & Casino Supervision Commission, said his department had noticed spikes in gambling activity coinciding with GMI payment dates, prompting the regulator to consider “technical solution” to cross-reference GMI beneficiary lists with casino membership records.
An issue raised by Giannis Vasiliadis, director of WBAS, was the limited access to recipients’ banking information. This limited data can hint at suspicious activity but cannot conclusively verify gambling transactions.
What is Seamen?
One answer is that the industry is no longer being valued primarily on the promise of endless growth. The market instead wants to see profit, cash generation and manageable regulation maintained across all facets of a listed business. Ed Birkin, managing director of H2 Gambling Capital, says the longer-term decline in gambling stocks runs much deeper than just changes to earnings forecasts.
“The industry share price declines have been much more severe than the cut to earnings projections which means that, while there may be some weakening in some companies’ fundamental growth drivers, the valuations that investors are putting on them have been the main driver of share price declines – although weaker fundamentals lead to lower valuations, so the reality is that they’re completely intertwined.”
Entain’s demotion comes after another – and arguably more significant – symbolic move by Flutter Entertainment. Flutter began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in January 2024 and later moved its primary listing from London to New York.
