Any new casino operator hoping to grab a piece of the action in Mexico is going to have to put its plans on the back burner for now. The gambling landscape in the country is changing quickly this year, with new tax guidance issued this past June that stands to test operators’ resilience to maintain a presence in the country. In addition, President Manuel López Obrador has just passed down an order to halt the approval of new casino license applications while launching an investigation into how previous licenses may have been illegally awarded. 

According to Obrador, there are doubts about how one of his predecessors, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, led the licensing approval process while in office from December 1, 2000, to November 30, 2006. The current president believes that Fox may have created “inadequate” licensing policies, and wants Secretary of the Interior (SEGOB, for its Spanish acronym) Olga Sánchez Cordero to look into the matter. While the alleged inadequacies don’t appear to apply to all the casino licenses that were issued, no details about targeted license holders were provided. 

States Obrador (translated from Spanish), “We are going to ‘clean up’ the government. We have a problem and we are going to solve it because we are coherent and persistent. We want no more casinos to open and no more permits to be granted. Some that began during Vicente Fox’s administration were not adequate. We are not going to grant such permits. Some licenses may have been issued but that is because we need to clean up the government and we have been doing that for a long time now, but we are not done yet. It is sometimes noted that for each authorized casino about seven million pesos [$316,890] are obtained.

“We would have to look into that. The Secretary of the Interior has to conduct an investigation and if these licenses have been wrongfully granted, they should be revoked.”