A multimillion-euro online gambling racket involving parlours across Italy was directly connected to a server hosted by a Qormi-based company, the Times of Malta was told.

Months-long investigations by the Italian fiscal police led to the arrest of seven people suspected of involvement. They included Massimiliano Fullin and Fabio Veglianetti, directors of Medialive Limited, which operates an online gambling company licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority, gaming industry sources said.

The sources said Operation Doppio Jack, as the investigation was dubbed, indicated that about 24 gaming parlours in six Italian regions were possibly being used for clandestine gambling activities not recorded by the Italian fiscal authorities.

The racket, which is also being investigated to establish if money-laundering activities were involved, is calculated to have been handling about €10 million worth of gambling activities every month using a system connected to the Malta-based servers. The Florence procurators leading the investigation suspect that the full-blown illegal operation ran in parallel to a legal online gaming system offered by the Qormi company.

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Further to the recent booming of the cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, we are seeing a ripple effect of request to implement these trends within established and start-up gaming companies.

You want to be innovative and be ahead of others? There is no other option, but to venture yourself into the acceptance of cryptocurrencies and the technology underlying it. This is well known as the distributed ledger technology or better known as blockchain.

However, IGA recommendation is that prior pursuing any further; it is recommended that one may look into the regulatory requirements.

The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union is doing its best to take up with the technological changes and innovation. It has presented an amendment to 4th AMLD to regulate all cryptocurrency exchanges in EU. It is also the intention to look into the possibility of regulating the exchanging under an existing directive which is the payment services directive.

At IGA we assist our clients to set up their own Initial coin offerings (ICOs) which have recently became a primary means of fundraising for their business development built on the blockchain technology. Unfortunately so far this is currently being done without any regulatory oversight. This has caused a chaos of worries around the world of a possible widespread of money laundering and fraud.

Malta Gaming Authority chairman Joe Cuschieri will be taking the helm of the Malta Financial Services Authority once the current and long-serving chairman Joe Bannister steps down at the end of the year.

This newspaper is also informed that Labour MP and former tourism minister Edward Zammit Lewis had first been approached to take on Bannister’s role at the MFSA, but had refused the offer.

During the last election campaign, the Prime Minister had announced that Bannister intended stepping down from the Authority by the year’s end, insisting that his departure was a personal choice as he felt it was his time to leave, and that "there were no political or any other reasons”.

BetConstruct has announced that Vahe Baloulian is to step down from his role as chief executive of the company.

Baloulian will leave the position at the end of the month, with Vigen Badalyan, founder and executive chairman of the firm, to take over from November 1.

Having joined BetConstruct as a strategic advisor in 2011, Baloulian went on to become chief executive in 2015 and has served in the role ever since.