“Astro expresses his amazement on this matter to the ordinance published on 12 March last, with which the Mayor of San Lazzaro di Savena (BO) has established that establishments having a different main activity compared to the gaming offer (such as, for example, bars) located at a distance of less than 500m from the sensitive places envisaged by LR 5/2013, will be able to keep the gaming machines functioning. I play AWP only for one hour a day: from 11.30 to 12.30″. This is what we read in a note from the association.
“Given the disproportionality and economic unsustainability of this intervention, it appears, first of all, as a mocking provocation aimed at the entrepreneurs who carry out the activity of managing the devices and their respective employees. What, in fact, results in an inhibition of gaming activities in the businesses covered by the ordinance, represents, moreover, a surreptitious forcing of the dictates of the same regional law 5/2013, which, in fact, allows such activities to continue to carry out the gaming offer until the concessions expire, set for 31 December this year. This provision – explains the association -, which, from what we understand, constitutes a unicum at national level, it was adopted despite the ongoing process of reorganization of the entire land-based gaming sector, in the approval process of which a decisive role is also reserved for the regions and local authorities and among whose objectives is that of standardize, on a homogeneous level throughout the national territory, the regulation of the times and territorial location of gaming activities.
Furthermore - adds Astro -, we strongly denounce the gravity inherent in the substantial equalization of the owners of legal activities - recipients of the ordinance in question - to criminal organisations; equivalence found in the following passage and in its inclusion among the reasons that would justify the adoption of the ordinance: <in November 2023 the National Anti-Mafia Commission announced that gambling income represents, today, the main source of income for the mafias, even surpassing drug trafficking>>. In addition to having a clear defamatory content, this statement denotes a logical short circuit: in fact, the illicit profits that the mafias obtain from the illegal exercise of the gaming offer find even more fertile ground precisely in measures of this nature, which, causing the The expulsion of legal gaming from the territory unintentionally opens up new spaces for the offer managed by criminal organisations.
As regards the serious problem of gaming addiction – highlights the association -, the clear observation of how unrealistic the preventative purpose of time and territorial limitations is in the context of a society dominated by digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence is sufficient to relegate these tools to the rank of mere propaganda spots, especially when, as in the case in question, they are used in such a provocatively disproportionate manner, to the point of assuming, as the only connotations, those of an instrument designed to undermine, in roundabout ways, the entire legal public gaming system. Among the effects that this ordinance will produce (none of which will, unfortunately, have anything to do with the vaunted benefits in the fight against addiction phenomena) there is also that of contributing to fueling the trend, already underway, of the shift in demand for gaming from the physical to the online channel: a further blow to small and medium-sized Italian businesses which make up the majority of the entrepreneurial and employment fabric linked to the legal offer of physical gaming. As.Tro, given the clarifications set out above, reserves the right to evaluate the conditions for possible legal actions to defend the category", concludes the association.
