All £5m of the settlement will be directed to the Government’s Consolidated Fund
Three nationwide casino operators owned by Rank are to pay £5m after a Gambling Commission investigation revealed anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures.
Rank Group-owned operators Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited, who run 51 casinos across Great Britain,will also undergo a third-party audit to ensure they are effectively implementing anti-money laundering and safer gambling policies, procedures and controls.
Anti-Money Laundering (AML) failures included implementing AML policies, procedures and controls which allowed inconsistent decisions to be applied to customers with elevated money laundering risk.
Rank is also said to have implemented unclear policies, procedures and controls which resulted in inappropriate risk levels being ascribed to high-risk customers and high-risk sources of funds being used by customers without appropriate scrutiny and didn’t carry out enhanced customer due diligence checks when its own policies required it.
Social responsibility failures included not carrying out safer gambling interactions with a customer during a period in which they lost £50,000. It didn’t have a record of any safer gambling interactions with a customer who won approximately £260,000 in a short period and then lost around £250,000 in 12 days. It didn’t carry out safer gambling interactions with a customer who was returning after a period of self-exclusion until they had lost £25,000.
All £5m of the settlement will be directed to the Government’s Consolidated Fund.
Sue Young, Commission Executive Director of Operations, said: “Larger enforcement cases are often associated with online gambling but, as today’s announcement shows, the risks of anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures are equally alive in the land-based sector.
“We would advise all premises-based operators to take a careful look at this case and ensure their own business is not making the same mistakes, and therefore they do not face costly and inevitable Commission action.”