The last six months have seen three significant changes within ESSA. First, we announced that Heike Mayer would pick up the baton of Chair after Mike O’Kane, a veteran of over 40 years in the industry stepped down following his retirement from Ladbrokes. Mike did a great job in repositioning the association and has been an influential and vocal advocate of ESSA members and our sector in general and I would like to thank him for all his hard work over the last five years. Heike, who is responsible for Public and Regulatory Affairs at GVC, is well-versed in the issues facing our sector and I look forward to working with her to deliver and implement a strategy that meets those challenges.
Second, we expanded our Board of Directors to reflect our growing membership and I’m delighted that Paddy Power Betfair and Betway will be bringing their wealth of experience to the table to help drive us forward to achieve our goals.
Third, we employed our first full time Betting Integrity Officer, Matt Fowler, who was previously at Paddy Power Betfair in a similar positon.
The creation of this role was part of our strategic objective for 2017 and it highlights our desire to continue to improve the association and build upon its two main aims of representing the views of members on integrity issues and to developing and utilising the ESSA alert platform to combat the menace from betting related corruption. In a future edition of the quarterly report Matt will be explaining his role in more detail.
In other significant news, I was contacted by the Council of Europe (CoE) which has asked ESSA to deliver a report on behalf of the private sports betting industry to feed into their ongoing efforts to ratify the CoE’s match-fixing Convention. The principal focus of the report will be the information exchange between operators, sports and national platforms and how to identify risk and improve risk management.
ESSA is well-placed to lead on this and it is an excellent opportunity for us to put forward our views and participate in a high-level international conference planned by the Council of Europe in early 2018. It will also feed into our own integrity conference at Lords Cricket Ground in London on 12 October, for which an attendee registration page is now available on the ESSA website.
In this edition of the quarterly report you will find an article from Professor Nolte, from the Institute of Sports Law at the University of Cologne, who has analysed the gambling regulation currently in place in Germany and finds that it has failed to adequately protect the betting related threats to the integrity of sports competitions. We also have an article from Ian Smith who is the Commissioner for the eSports Integrity Coalition (ESIC). Ian explains how a lack of governance in the sector and the growth of betting on eSports saw the ESIC created to deal with betting related fraud and wider threats to the sector.
Khalid Ali
Secretary General
You can read the rest of the report here!
