London, March 21st 2017— Kiron Interactive has extended its operations in South America after agreeing a six-year deal with Impresora Internacional de Valores S.A. (IVISA).

The specialist virtuals provider will offer it’s fully customisable BetMan Online RGS to IVISA, an Argentina-licensed lottery and gaming solutions supplier.

Kiron’s portfolio, which is the most varied in the industry, features horse racing, greyhound racing and motor racing, and will be added to the 500 terminals already syndicated at retail and online outlets located in more than 135 lottery parlors.

Steven Spartinos, CEO of Kiron Interactive, said: “We are delighted to have agreed a deal with IVISA and look forward to working with them as we push towards a common goal in South America.

The Philippines is set to issue a new set of Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) licenses to online gambling companies.

Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) chair Andrea Domingo told reporter in a news conference at the first day of the ASEAN Gaming Summit that there will be second batch of online gambling operators who will be accorded with POGO licenses.

Domingo said that there are at least 78 applications for POGOs in her desk as of the moment.

“But not all of them will be granted with licenses,” Domingo pointed out.

There’s only a few days left before the iGaming Asia Congress returns, bringing with it the latest opportunities, strategies and innovations for social casino operators as well as mobile gaming executives in the region.

Blockchain payment technology is one of the topics that will discussed next week at the iGA. Blockchain is known as the technology behind digital currency bitcoin, but many institutions, particularly in Asia, are starting to find other use cases for it.

Asia and blockchain, according to experts, is a match made in heaven—especially if we’re talking about payments. Despite the many technological advances today, the process of sending money around the world continues to be slow, expensive and in some cases, unreliable.

Blockchain, or the distributed ledger technology, could help unify the global payments system by enabling banks to process transactions directly, instantly and securely in a matter of seconds. Currently, the technology is being explored by many banks, particularly in Asia. OCBC Bank, for instance, is the first bank in Southeast Asia to use blockchain in its local and cross-border payment funds transfer services.

The opening up of the multi-billion dollar casinos in Japan in the near future will not likely to affect current gambling jurisdictions across the Asia-Pacific region.

This is according to international credit-debt watcher Fitch Ratings which said that it is unlikely for Japan casinos to trigger casino cannibalization in the region.

But Vicky Melbourne, the ratings agency’s head of Industrials, Property and Consumer for South and Southeast Asia, pointed out that the success or failure of each gambling jurisdictions depend on the products it offers in their area.

“No sorts of specific, because as we’ve told earlier, it is sort of having the right product, the right sort of property and the infrastructure around to support the integrated resorts,” Melbourne told CalvinAyre.com at the sidelines of the ASEAN Gaming summit.

The case of the Philippines vs. Singapore is more than just a question of who will overtake whom. The two countries have very different regimes and economic policies, so timeframes must be kept in mind here. From an outsider perspective who hasn’t been to either country, it looks as if the Philippines can overtake Singapore in the short to medium term, but that Singapore is more stable in the long run.

The positives for the Philippines are that, first, while gambling may be a crony industry favoring the government-connected over independent entrepreneurs, it is still protected by the existence of PAGCOR. Not in terms of taxation, because the on-again off-again fights about who taxes PAGCOR and for how much is not really a fight over tax levels, but over which government agency gets to decide where the taxes are going. PAGCOR protects the gambling industry because its existence means the government already has full control over the entire industry and therefore won’t harm it too badly.

Why is Rodrigo Duterte attacking the black market drug industry so hard, but leaving the gambling industry (at least the brick and mortar casinos) alone? Because the illegal drug industry does not pay taxes. But no government wants to bite the hand that feeds it, and all of PAGCOR’s revenues essentially belong to the government.

Then why the constant fight about what taxation PAGCOR is subject to, franchise or corporate etc.? That’s all a question of who controls the tax revenue. Since in the end all PAGCOR revenues go to the government anyway as it is a 100% state-owned firm, the fight is just intergovernmental bickering about which part of the government has the privilege of using the money for whatever project it would like to fund. The Filipino casinos have basically admitted this many times, since PAGCOR license fees fall when PAGCOR has to pay more “corporate taxes” and they rise when it has to pay “less”, so to speak. Either way the casinos pay the same amount to PAGCOR, more or less.

New documents have emerged in the midst of the closely-watched legal battle between the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and digital currency exchange Coinbase, revealing that only a small number of digital currency owners in the United States are reporting their profits or losses in their annual tax returns.

Last week, the tax agency filed an affidavit from IRS agent David Utzke in a San Francisco federal court that disclosed additional details about how IRS is conducting its investigation into possible tax fraud committed by residents in the United States who engaged in business with or through Coinbase.

Utzke said he ran a computer analysis on the IRS’s tax records and found out that less than a thousand people filed a Form 8949 for a “property description likely related to bitcoin.” Under current IRS rules, bitcoin owners are required to declare their profits using the said form.

“…In 2013, 807 individuals reported a transaction on Form 8949 using a property description likely related to bitcoin; in 2014, 893 individuals reported a transaction on Form 8949 using a property description likely related to bitcoin; and in 2015, 802 individuals reported a transaction on Form 8949 using a property description likely related to bitcoin,” Utzke said in his affidavit.

The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) is eyeing the holiday-island of Cebu as the next gambling destination of the Philippines.

In a news conference during the ASEAN Gaming Summit, PAGCOR chair Andrea Domingo floated the idea of replicating PAGCOR Entertainment City in Cebu as she believes Manila is slowly becoming too congested for another multi-billion integrated casino resort.

“We listen to our investors. They asked us to give a 5-year breathing space,” Domingo told reporters.

The Southeast Asian country, which is aiming to compete with Macau and Singapore casinos amid plunging revenues, has already allowed four resorts being built in the 120-hectare seaside Entertainment City complex in the capital with a minimum investment of $1 billion each.

A billionaire-backed real estate company, FLC Group Joint-stock Co., wants to cash in on Vietnam’s three-year casino pilot program.

In a statement to Bloomberg, FLC Group confirmed that the government of Quang Vinh gave the greenlight to its unit, FLC Faros Van Don, to build a $2 billion casino resort in the Van Don Special Economic Zone located on the islands of Ngoc Vung and Van Canh. The developer plans to build a five-star hotel, a convention center and a golf course on 4,000 hectares of land, which it hopes will attract not just tourists but also domestic gamblers, according to the news outlet.

FLC Group is co-founded by billionaire lawyer Trinh Van Quyet and operates in commerce and services, the company said on its website.

The government of Vietnam announced early this year that it would allow citizens over 21 years old to play in local casinos from mid-March as long as they have a monthly income of at least VND10 million (USD445). Under the three-year pilot program, local residents will be allowed to gamble at two select casinos—one in Quang Ninh province and the other on Phu Quoc island.

Amid debates over regulating gambling activities in India, the government of Nagaland has approved yet another online poker website.

Baazi Networks Pvt. Ltd., which operates online poker website PokerBaazi.com, received a license to operate online poker games from the Nagaland government, GLaws.in reported.

This is the fifth license issued under the Nagaland Prohibition of Gambling and Promotion and Regulation of Games of Skill Rules, 2016 and the Nagaland Prohibition of Gambling and Promotion and Regulation of Online Games of Skill Rules, 2016. The Nagaland Rules and Act legally allow online skill games to be played with stakes or real money across the country, unless other states pass a legislative or executive order outlawing the games.

Aside from PokerBaazi, four other websites have received a license from the Nagaland government—Khelo365, Pokabunga, Pokerhigh and Club Empire.

Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation chairman Andrea Domingo has painted a rosy picture of the country’s gambling industry, saying that the introduction of its new licenses for online gambling will propel the state regulator’s revenue to PHP65 billion (US$1.3 billion) in 2017.

In her keynote speech before the gambling executives attending the inaugural ASEAN Gaming Brief Summit, Domingo boasted that the state-run gaming firm achieved its highest income in the agency’s history last year when it posted a P55.06 billion (US$1.1 billion) gross income.

She attributed the 16.62 percent increase of PAGCOR’s revenue to the improving market, as well as newly implemented in-house efficiency has made it possible for the state regulator to achieve its highest income in history last year.

“Adding to this advantages, are the fact we have introduced many innovations. For example, instead of random sampling of our managerial and enforcement activities, we have strengthened this. We now have 24-hr, seven days a week presence… this yielded us P8 billion more in 2015,” Domingo pointed out.