Elephant Treasure

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Beyond offering crypto payment solutions, a number of black market operators are licensed in “light touch” offshore jurisidictions which use opaque offshore operating structures to help to obscure company ownership and make local enforcement against these companies complex, the report noted.

By comparison, the long tail of smaller black market sites rely heavily on affiliates to generate traffic.

Much of the onus for the increasing black market is put on increasingly restrictive policies enforced by regulators across the licensed sector.

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Cambodia’s gambling regulatory authority, the Commercial Gambling Management Commission of Cambodia (CGMC), is advancing plans to introduce a formal suitability screening process for casino licence renewals. 

The CGMC reviewed a draft of the new evaluation framework during a meeting chaired by Secretary General Yeth Vinel on 4 September. 

The proposed “integrity and quality” framework aims to establish minimum conditions that operators must meet to maintain or obtain a licence, signalling a strengthening of oversight in the sector. The details of the scoring criteria and an official implementation date remain unpublished.

What is Elephant Treasure?

The city council legalised VGTs in its latest budget that took effect in January. Mayor Brandon Johnson opposed the move but was overruled by a council majority. Johnson and his colleagues have fought over the issue all year, which is still largely unresolved.

The mayor has not opined this summer, at least publicly, on if he believes Bally’s will open the casino in the first quarter of 2027. However, Johnson indicated in March that his administration is committed to projects such as Bally’s Chicago that foster economic development, while creating new jobs for numerous neighborhoods across the city.

“We appreciate Bally’s partnership and the thousands of construction workers helping bring Bally’s Chicago Casino to life – a major investment in our city’s future,” Johnson wrote in a social media post on X.