Every January, hordes descend upon the English capital marching through some of Europe's most famous commercial thoroughfares to seek and secure the best possible deals. For the retail market, they will visit Oxford Street and The Kings Road among others, but if gaming and betting is their business, they will go to Earl's Court to the International Casino Exhibition (ICE), which ended last week.
Halls and halls of exhibitors offer their wares, anything from slot machines to the best possible software platform for a numerical sequence. Malta was there too and what we were selling was our history. Not literally, of course, but without the independence constitution and the EU accession treaty we could hardly have such a strong offering: we have used our sovereignty to challenge the gaming monopolies that exist elsewhere in the Union and passed laws that subsequently attracted scores of gaming businesses (some of them very large and powerful) to come to Malta.
These set up companies and obtained a licence to offer gaming services over the web. Effectively, they became corporate citizens. Punters everywhere, including those in France, Italy and Holland (which have monopolies) now had an array of choices where they previously had none.
Big business flows through Maltese poker, casino and other websites and has become a real source of revenue for the government. Their presence has also had a very positive ripple effect on several sectors of our economy, and we all have an interest in its growth. Indeed, we were so successful that other countries sought to block Maltese companies and websites. Quick to defend the industry, Malta has consistently advocated that the freedom of movement of services in the EU should not exclude betting services simply because some of the larger EU member states want to hang on to their monopolies.
History, however, is not unique to us. The Gibraltarians and the Channel Islanders have a history too. So do the Native Americans in Canada, and in one way or another, all of these and more have used their past to shape their present. Thus, the Mohawks of the Kahnawake reserve, south of Montreal, are believed to have issued about 400 online licences to date. How's that for competition from unexpected quarters ?
In this year's ICE, I picked up echoes of a feeling that has existed for a while in Malta too. As one lanky industry insider told me, "Malta needs to be careful lest it gets burdened down by the weight of its own success. If you can't service your many existing clients efficiently enough, you know what will happen; they'll just unplug their servers and move out quickly. Whatever it costs, it will be cheaper for them than waiting around."
The Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LGA) has done an admirable job and now has a bright new team coming in to build on that. The new chairman and board are already in place, a chief executive is being sought and fresh legal blood is mixing with the excellent stock that there is already. They look like people well up to the challenges ahead.
Ultimately however, we trade on product, not potential. I once asked a partner at Linklaters, a top London law firm we were working with, why his teams laboured on through the night. His reply wasn't cryptic at all: "Because we have to", he said.
Like Linklaters, the LGA is now doing business across multiple time zones. It needs to have the management will and political backing to do whatever is required to keep the business and nurture it. If it requires more resources to acquit its task, the government should ensure that it receives it. Going forward, LGA's new management would do well to immediately review its pending applications and requests for assistance. I think it may find that some of them, particularly those awaiting the nod for multi-jurisdictional operations, are distinctly overdue.
When a company does not receive a licence it applied for within the two months that the LGA gives in its guidelines, it may wait a bit longer but will eventually start to look at other places.
Perhaps its CEO will call that regulator from whatsitsname, whom he met at ICE last January. Let's face it, for most people in the industry Malta was a blurry reference too before we developed the product we have.
It is up to us to ensure we never go back there again.
Dr Sapiano is a partner at Aequitas Legal