(Jamma) – 2013 is coming to a close and as we move towards 2014, with one eye on the hopes placed under the tree, Eugene Bernardi writes a free rein contribution to help us understand what to throw away with the old year and what we cannot and must not forget for 2014.
We are at the winding down of a troubled year, like the past but I would say perhaps the worst of the last for the automatic gaming and small prizes sector. Many ask me what will happen in 2014, it is not easy to answer…
In my daily informative work on the game to the many colleagues dazed and frightened by the actions of certain (by now many, too many) media and moralistic pseudo-organizations and often incompetent ludophobic politicians, I observe that such aggressiveness has never been seen in other sectors such as for example for alcohol (by minors with great use and abuse - disappeared from every news or television service) or for smoking, we no longer even talk about drugs or aids (problems and pathologies where there are reliable statistics verified by studies scientific studies that highlight the great damage to young people).
Only slots are demonized (a generic term that does not distinguish the very different types of games, i.e. Newslots with 1 euro stake from VLTs with stakes of up to 10 euro) only pathological gambling or gambling addictions, due only to devices, not we are talking about scratch cards for 20 euros a hit (sold in thousands of places without any specific authorization even if initially provided for in art. 86/88 of the TULPS), online video poker or online casinos with pounding television advertisements (on well-known football teams and on the scoreboards in stadiums) and finally on some dedicated channels visible at all times, even to minors.
That the game, which has become the third economic voice of the Italian country due to the volumes of its introductions, thanks also to the pumping in the past of data heralded by an Administration eagerly pushed by a certain political class (first) to proclaim certain results achieved in recent years , unaware armed wing of certain interests (the always named institutional business lobbies that some surveys have highlighted) and which have nothing to do with the associative interests of the healthy and industrious base of a sector of small and medium enterprises which mostly manage Newslots and above all who collect the PREU and pay millions of euros to the starving state coffers.
Companies overwhelmed by the great legislative error of entrusting the management and control to 10 concessionaires (often self-controllers in the management of appliances) in strong contrast with the rules on conflict of interest and to which they added 3 more, not satisfied.
Rules on gaming and games in general written with some approximations that have dragged the whole sector since the early years of the reform entrusted to AAMS first with Biella, then the Black slot case and after the investigation by the Grandi Commission and that of the GAT/ Court of Auditors to the famous penalties of 98 billion, calculated on administrative provisions signed too lightly by equally incompetent new concessionaires, penalties then probably and rightly recalculated downwards, but a source of great and further scandal given the figure of 2,5 billion euros and now hit by the media on a daily basis on the partial amnesty accepted by only 6 out of 10 dealerships.
I wonder but whoever made the initial calculations and whoever still endorses certain theses never asked himself what he would have to pay and above all how and with what money those 98 billion, will rebut by some and among these also a well-known ex colonel of the GdF that the signed contracts must be honoured, yes, but if they provide for incorrect or vexatious clauses or insane penalties and it is no coincidence that there were modifying acts, but the vulnus and the error continue to persecute us, as well as the other age-old faults that the game is in the hands of the underworld and that there are irregular appliances.
Coming to the many investigations (sometimes a little too late) in which infiltrations of the underworld or the mafias have been discovered, certainly there are in the game as in dozens of economic activities, but not for this reason sectors such as construction, procurement public or the waste cycle, all activities infiltrated by the underworld, no one has ever dreamed that in order to eradicate the underworld infiltrations if they have to close these sectors, but then the same politics that hosted parliamentarians smelling like the mafia, Parliament has not closed , attempts have been made to make adequate laws.
I remind the most ignorant that to operate in the gaming machine sector you need to be registered on a list in which you need to have certain stringent requirements including anti-mafia certification.
The same story for irregular gaming, the checks are good but the violations found must be well classified in order not to give breath to certain media that talk about irregular arcades 1 out of 4, I remind those media that the last checks were mostly arcades bets (perhaps without the license art.88 of the TULPS but of foreign origin) and the so-called video poker machines were mostly totem devices, completely unrelated to and different from the so-called certified and approved Newslots.
I apologize for this long preamble and I'll get to the heart of the matter, the well-known Undersecretary in charge of gaming in an interview with a well-known Catholic newspaper, in the front row against gaming, speaks of a reduction of 1/3 of the Newslot fleet.
Parentheses the managers of that newspaper or other newspapers or no slot sites where they were in 2004 when the first regular machines came out or above all in 2006 with the arrival of thousands of betting rooms or thousands of points of sale for scratch cards or Superenalotto 3 times a week or again in 2009 when the Abruzzo Decree was passed which suddenly required the installation of 57 video lottery machines (I always remember that there are no more than 160 in the world)?
The lawyer is right. Sbordoni in his article "The protection of the legal sector", in the eagerness and competition to make regional laws on the fight against gaming, often these regional exponents do not know the national laws, they completely ignore the difference between Newslot and VLT, they forget things and/or measures already included in national laws, above all they forget the Constitution.
Let's cut it! “We shall fight”, we will fight.
The pessimism of reason and the optimism of the will. (Gramsci)
Too often I think about next year. I wish the future was better, I'm not saying happy but at least more serene. Sometimes, I'm actually afraid it's just an illusion. I'm afraid that expectations may exceed reality, that the future won't be as good as I imagine it is now. But the most solid pleasure of this life is the vain pleasure of illusions, as Leopardi says.
I am disappointed. From many things. Disappointed by my colleagues, by society, above all by certain politics, by myself who have always believed in it. I no longer want to feel oppressed every day by an asphyxiating bureaucracy, by lying media and politicians; I would like to feel free to do business, free not in the sense of doing everything and only what I like, but free without feeling guilty, without having to feel like shit. I am fed up with the media at every opportunity, a certain policy which, to hide its past and present mistakes, claims or propagandizes that all the country's problems are linked to gambling and in particular to slots (a term now abused just like video poker was in the past ). I have 32 years in the trade, I have a lot of experience, but still a lot to learn. I know I'm ready to face every day the new challenges that the sector is called upon and my small company as a result. But this living always and only guilty is getting tighter and tighter on me, it's suffocating me, wearing me down, like dozens of other small-game or entertainment operators. Need to change things, but how?
These are difficult years, where many certainties fail, not only in our sector which still gives work to thousands of companies, made up of expert and qualified technicians and personnel.
Now let's give it a break: to an inefficient Administration, to the dreaded and continuous requests for an increase in the PREU to heavy taxes and long times and to the uncertainty from the much advocated new devices of how and when they will come out, if they will come out, to the illegality of certain products (promotional games and Totems), to the State when it does not pay for its mistakes or does not assert its prerogatives towards other administrations.
We must, by joining the best forces in the sector and those who work to build rather than destroy.
This is no wonder, given the economic framework in which the automatic and small-win games companies are forced to work. Enough hypocrisy! Enough fictions!
Eugene Bernardi
