GAMBLING

by Carlotta Zavattiero


I’m a journalist and I have a particular interest in gambling, this great way of defrauding the citizens. At one time I thought that even the average Italian person was fairly responsible: "why are you gambling?". Basically you want to get easy money now, but I realised that the issue is both political and cultural. Intervention needs to come from the top and it’s not appropriate to pass off gambling as an alternative way for the State to make money, because the State is getting poorer as are the Italian people.

 The State manages gambling via the body called Aams, well it did in the past, but now Aams no longer exists. Aams was the body administering State monopolies and in July it was taken over as a result of a "spending review” and it now forms part of the Agenzia delle dogane e monopoli {Agency for customs and monopolies}. We can witness the hypocrisy in the field of legalised gambling when you consider that Aams itself (we’re using the name Aams, but of course it’s really the Agency for customs and monopolies) has set up a series of initiatives involving going into schools saying that they are talking about prevention when in fact they are promoting gambling to the students.

What’s happening? That representatives of the Agency for customs and monopolies are going into schools and talking to the high school students, thus they are talking to youngsters who are not yet adults, to warn them about the risks of gambling. The worrying thing is that these youngsters, that perhaps haven’t even heard about slot machines, are given a message that is not "don’t gamble", as they could be told "don’t take drugs" or "don’t smoke", but "gamble responsibly"! They make out that they are promoting a message of prevention, when in fact it’s a promotional message. 

  The crazy thing that no one is noticing is that while Italians are spending more on gambling, the State is getting a smaller amount in revenues from gambling taxes. This is because the tax called Preu, that is the tax on the various types of gambling, is lower on the most widespread forms of gambling like scratch cards and slot machines. However, how come in a country that is getting poorer, where people are having to pull in their belts, they can still spend a thousand euro on gambling? Well I would suggest one possibility is because the figures might be inflated by the investment in gambling coming from organised crime. There’s certainly something that doesn’t add up!

 

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