Thread by @MackemFox

right, @ScottBentonMP @GoodLawProject @mrjamesob anyone living in #blackpool anyone affected by #Gambling or anyone who thinks that corporate lobbying is not rife and divisive.
This may be a long thread.....

Scott in Parliament yesterday (22/7/21): “It is a pleasure to lead this Adjournment debate on the review of the Gambling Act 2005. I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.”

Scott accepted >£7,500 in ‘hospitality’ in the last 5 weeks.

This is what the 'interest' is, it was all from gaming companies, it is in their 'interest':

He went on: “Betting and gaming is a key part of the UK’s dynamic and diverse leisure and entertainment industry.”

So, highly addictive and potentially financially crippling gambling is now being sold to you as harmless ‘leisure and entertainment’.

“The Government desperately need those jobs and the tax revenue..”

Scott accepted >£4,500 this month (July 2021) from a Gibraltar registered company, Entain Operations and >£1500 from Gamesys Group, registered in Jersey.
How can the UK Govt collect tax on this?

What taxes Scott, what taxes?

Lets look at 'UK based' hospitality giver Gamesys Operations accounts for the year up to Dec 2019 is a bit of an eye opener. Why wouldn’t they bung some hospitality to a pliable Tory MP to keep their hands on results like this.

Remember Scott said “The Government desperately need those jobs and the tax revenue..”
Gamesys Operations is part of Gamesys Group, which now has a new ‘holding company’, Anzo. Effectively all the same lot, just shuffling the money about.

Scott accepted ‘hospitality’ from Gamesys Operations, so lets look there.
So, they have a tax bill of (£1,156,986) namely a loss, which they can use in future years to offset against any profit.
So, £48m of UK cash went into their account and resulted in a £1.5m loss. No tax paid

So nearly £46m of their turnover was from the tax havens of Gibraltar and the Bahamas, when you play one of their games the money is deposited there.

Scott also mentioned the ‘Jobs’, well Gamesys Operation has a huge wage bill......

, they must employ thousands of people, supporting local economies like Scott’s in Blackpool?

Ahh, staff costs (including directors)…..

So, the company effectively employs just over 400 people, most of those are ‘technical’ probably software, where they are actually based is an unknown, although they do have one operation in the UK, on Regent St in London (NOT Blackpool), Mice and Dice.

So then Scott, you start banging on about ‘black market’ gambling;
“The hon. Member makes a valid point about the so-called black market or offshore gambling. Billions of pounds of UK customers’ money is spent on black market websites every single year”

You also said offshore…… which kind of offshore? The ones that pay you, in kind, or the one that don’t.
You claim: “The existence and potential growth of the black market poses a significant threat in terms of lost tax revenue, lost jobs..”

Your pals at Gamesys, based in the 7th worst tax haven in the world, pay no tax, only employ around 400 people and all this from a turnover of £43m

What is the 'great leap forward' for your constituents based on companies like this?
I'm only 1/2 done with you, expect more later.

Well Scott, your other corporate hospitality bunger is Entain (Gibraltar).
Entain is not a company I'd heard of, but we know their brands:

Looks like the HMPC were sniffing around them in relation to 'potential corporate offending' last year.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entain

Entain is another of these entities with multiple sub companies.
They claim on their website to have offices in 18 territories across 5 continents and employ >24,000 people.
>3000 betting shops (Ladbrokes and Coral)

## People of Blackpool ##
Your champion of Jobs Scott Benton

Accepts 'hospitality' from a company with the massive presence of ... checks notes... 5 Ladbrokes shops and 1 Coral shop in Blackpool.
Actually Scott accepts hospitality from Entain (Gibraltar), the tax haven located arm of Entain.

Entain in the UK, Entain holdings (UK)

seem to have subsumed Ladbrokes and Coral in some weird deal, where the parent part of Entain, presumably in a tax haven, loaned >£1billion to the UK part.
I take it that the UK part can pay back parts of the loan before they pay tax, which is probably why Entain holdings (UK)

posted a loss of nearly £23m.

There are other arms of Entain, that seem to provide 'financial services' to other parts of the group, where directors are being paid in the £millions.

These are the people that Scott is really speaking up for.
They want the so called 'black market', unregulated gambling

clamped down on as it is nabbing a piece of their gambling pie that they want so that they can avoid paying any tax on it.

Come on Scott, you really do owe the people of Blackpool a better explanation of what you are really trying to do.

Clamping down on black market,

unregulated, tax dodging companies is a worthy cause... just not when you are accepting 'hospitality' from companies that seem to employ, however many employees there are in 6 betting shops, in the Blackpool area and pay no tax.

Now we get onto Scott's take on the Gambling commission, he said (my highlighting):

So, pretty clear which side of the gambling commission fence Scott (has been told to) sit on.
A lot of the criticism has been from the industry for lumping big fines at operators who allow players to lose very large sums of money without doing any source of funds checks.

Companies have also been fined for allowing self excluding players to still lose £00,000s.
Gaming industry must be furious that they are being fined for allowing, so obviously, problem gamblers, to hand over money they cannot afford to them.

The National Audit Office issued a very critical report about the Gambling Commission last year, but not for the reasons Scott’s ‘hospitality donors’ want to hear.

There are an estimated 395,000 problem gamblers, 55,000 of them children, with a further 1.8 million deemed “at risk”. Six further people are affected by each addict, according to a study cited in the report.

The report lamented a lack of long-term research to measure the impact of the problem gambling. Research has suggested that the economic cost could be as much as £1.2bn a year, nearly half the industry’s £3bn annual tax contribution.

Scott went on to say:
(for readers who don’t know, RET is research, education, and treatment, currently funded by a voluntary 0.1% of their Gross Gambling Yield (the amount of money left after paying out winnings).

Did you see Scott’s little ‘I understand’ moment. He will have been coached to within an inch of his life with that one.
Here’s a snippet from a 2019 article, see who it is…. Entain’s previous name.
(Note he either fluffed his lines or they have pushed back the date by a year!)

I also note that Entain uses “UK gross gambling revenue”, does that mean if you play online and the money goes straight to an offshore entity it does not count as UK revenue? Be interesting to see the answer to that one Scott.

Scott then goes on to say:

I wonder what else the ‘cutting edge behavioural science’ is being used for when targetting their customers?

He goes on in hand wringingly good form:

£70 million a year is probably the same as the directors salaries of the 2 companies he associates with.

He finishes with his little pirouette “I hope he can progress with a rational and evidence-based assessment that takes into account the need to protect

the small number of people who have a gambling problem with the huge economic and cultural benefits that the industry has across the UK. “

What are the ‘huge economic benefits’ Scott?

Now we turn to your contribution to the UK Casino Industry debate on the 7th July this year.

Scott: “Thank you, Mr Mundell. Legislation fit for the modern-day customer would also enable casinos to offer a wider range of casino games via electronic terminals. That would allow gamblers to play at much lower stakes than on live tables.”

So, from banging on about jobs you are proposing ‘terminals’ rather than live tables. Live tables would have live people working at them.
Would these ‘terminals’ be linked to servers in tax havens? Would that be the first place a customers money lands?

We need answers Scott.

I notice that in that debate you also had Laurence Robertson banging your drum, he’s another one who has accepted ‘hospitality’ from Entain Operations (Gibraltar) as well as pocketing £12k a year as

‘Parliamentary Adviser on Sport and Safer Gambling to the Betting and Gaming Council’.
Is it a ‘good cop, bad cop’ arrangement or more Laurel and Hardy?

I will wind up this with some information that people with more clout on Twitter, Journalists in and around the Blackpool area or constituents of Scott’s may want to use, highlighting the fact that he is lobbying for an industry that will do little to revive Blackpool’s fortunes

Facts from the ONS:
(GVA is gross value added, the amount of money the industry takes in minus the amount it has to spend generating that income)

Since 2010 the GVA of gambling has grown 45% to £8.1b (the UK economy only grew by 18% over the same period)

The ‘gaming and betting industries’ employ 85,000 people (as of 2019)

The town with the largest reliance of this industry is, wait for it… its NOT Blackpool, its Stoke on Trent (home to Bet365). So a lot of the 85k jobs are in admin for these companies.

Now for the KO...

So, if you can spread this far and wide, if you live in Blackpool write to Scott, he’s YOUR MP he has to respond.

Enjoy and good luck, you deserve better than this.