It is now almost a year since crusading regulator Vlad-Cristian Soare took over as the head of Romania’s gambling authority and he shows little sign of slowing down.
After public and institutional trust in the National Office for Gambling (ONJN) collapsed, April 2025 saw Soare inherit an authority in freefall.
Public prosecutors found in early 2025 that over several years the regulator had allowed almost €1bn in fees to go unpaid, depriving the government of huge volumes of income it should have been extracting from the gambling industry.
With its reputation at rock-bottom, Soare arrived at ONJN with the grim knowledge that the agency might not even survive.
Numerous reports suggested that the government saw the regulator as a lost cause and that its functions would soon be folded back into the Ministry of Finance.
While the jury is still out on whether Soare has succeeded in rehabilitating the ONJN, he has at the very least managed to avoid its total destruction in the intervening 12 months.
Making moves
Soare says he is committed to reform and among his flagship policies is establishing Romania’s first industry-wide self-exclusion system.
In a potentially radical move, Soare has also called for a complete overhaul of the country’s gambling law, which he termed “morally outdated”.
“Mr. Soare has had a noticeably more active and visible start than several of his predecessors,” said Cosmina Maria Simion, managing parter at law firm WH Simion & Partners.
“From the outside, he appears to understand both the politics of the sector and the industry mechanics, which matters because one of the historical criticisms of the regulator was that it was either too passive, too politicised or too disconnected from how the market actually works,” she told EE Gaming.
Romania was formerly seen as one of Europe’s prime examples of a successful, modern online gambling market. The nation was among the first to directly authorise affiliates and require suppliers to be licensed.
That positive perception has changed, however, due to the gambling industry’s spiralling political fortunes, efforts by lawmakers to tighten rules and the collapse of trust in the ONJN.
Tough new measures introduced over the past few months include regulations making it illegal for suppliers to sell their content to providers who offer gambling into Romania without a licence.
The new government also hiked tax rates in its first post-election budget last year, raising online levies from 21 percent to 30 percent of gross gambling revenue (GGR) and adding a variable tax on winnings.
Soare’s calls to update the 2009 Gambling Act reflect a genuine feeling that new legisation is needed to deal with an industry that has evolved rapidly in the past two decades,
“We need a coherent, modern and efficient framework,” Soare said in a document laying out his 2026 priorities.
But he has also made it clear that he is motivated in part by the sheer volume of legislative proposals related to gambling that are flooding parliament.
A new act would ideally quieten a noisy political landscape in which consistent regulation is difficult, when lawmakers are constantly threatening to re-write the rulebook.
Zoltan Tuendik, Co-Founder and Head of Business at HIPTHER, which operates EE Gaming, has cautious optimism in Soare’s project.
“The past year has underscored both the fragility and resilience of Romania’s regulatory framework,” he said.
“The actions led by Vlad-Cristian Soare reflect a clear effort to restore credibility and reassert control over a market that had drifted into uncertainty.
“At the same time, these reforms are unfolding in a political climate where gambling has become a convenient target for public positioning, increasing the risk of policy being shaped as much by perception as by long-term strategy.”
Meet them head on
Part of Soare’s strategy to rebuild trust in the ONJN has been to engage in public forums with stakeholders and critics of Romanian gambling policy.
In the past few days, for example, he took to LinkedIn to celebrate an “important” victory over predictions giant Polymarket.
ONJN had previously taken enforcement action against the operator for offering illegal gambling in Romania through its event contract trading platform and Romanian courts rejected an appeal of that ruling.
Allowing Polymarket to continue trading would have opened the floodgates to a torrent of gambling operators seeking to dodge taxes and responsible gambling requirements by reclassifying themselves as prediction platforms, he said.
“The real stakes were to protect the legal framework that regulates gambling and prevent a dangerous loophole,” Soare added.
But the post also reveals his willingness to engage and mollify his critics. An approach that is unusual among top regulators.
Soare responded to one commenter on his Polymarket LinkedIn post who argued that it would be trivial for Romanians to continue accessing Polymarket via a VPN.
In response, regulator said that Polymarket was guilty of a “double standard” by not applying for a licence and that the ONJN was working on technology to restrict the ability of the gambling black market to operate in Romania.
Time will tell
With ONJN facing the axe mere months after he took office, Vlad-Cristian Soare’s decision to be more public and more personal than his predecessors may have been motivated by necessity as much as strategy.
Simion noted that the regulator still faces structural challenges, such as limited administrative capacity and inconsistent bureaucracy, while having to navigate significant political pressure and a gambling law that has become “increasingly fragmented after years of piecemeal amendments”. Despite this, she too is “cautiously positive” about the trajectory of Soare’s leadership.
“Rebuilding the market will depend not only on enforcement, but on restoring predictability and balance,” added Tuendik.
“As legislative changes take shape, the key challenge will be ensuring that player protection, enforcement and market attractiveness evolve together, rather than allowing the industry to be disproportionately constrained for short-term political gain.”
For now, the ONJN president has at least kept his ailing regulator afloat for a full year, keeping alive the hope of more widespread reforms.
