Denmark’s state-owned gambling and lottery operator Danske Spil has been fined $176k for alleged lapses in its anti-money laundering protocols.

On Wednesday, Danske Spil announced that it had agreed to pay a fine of DKK 1.2m imposed by the State Attorney for Special Economic and International Crime. The fine was related to the activities of a problem gambler who embezzled money from the insurance company at which he worked, then blew the lot with a number of gambling operators, including Danske Spil.

The gambler was a regular at Danske Spil between 2013 and 2015. The Spillemyndigheden gambling authority launched an investigation into the brouhaha in 2015 after the gambler’s embezzling ways came to light.

Danske Spil chairman Peter Gæmelke maintains that his company was paying the fine under protest, claiming that, back in 2013 when the embezzler began his losing streak, the regulator hadn’t yet offered guidance on gambling operators’ responsibilities for determining the source of their customers’ funding.

Poland has updated its blacklist of the online gambling domains it intends to block starting this summer.

On Friday, Poland’s Ministry of Finance added more names to its list of domains deemed to be offering online gambling services to Polish punters without the necessary local license. The list made its first appearance last month in a test mode but the Ministry has since decided it’s official time to take (domain) names and kick ass.

The list doesn’t contain a whole lot of household names, but there are a few familiar faces, including Marathonbet, Bet-at-home and Vulkanbet. The majority of the domains are either .com or .eu, although there is one Polish site, the Kahnawake-licensed Pankasyno.pl, as well as the Curacao-licensed 10futuriti.ru.

Under the amended Polish Gambling Act passed last December, all online operators not holding a Polish license were supposed to exit the market as of April 1. Many big operators have duly complied, likely fearing that their inability to legally justify their continued presence in Poland could create problems with regulators in other, more lucrative European online markets.

India’s Supreme Court has decided to consider the nuts and bolts of loosening the country’s longstanding prohibition on sports betting.

On Friday, the Times of India reported that a bench of Supreme Court Justices Dipak Misra and A M Khanwilkar had agreed to hear a public interest litigation (PIL) regarding possible updates to the Public Gaming Act of 1867 to allow for the possibility of legal sports betting.

The Court reportedly intends to incorporate the betting question into a separate pending case on cricket reforms that followed the 2013 India Premier League fixing scandal. Last July, the Court directed India’s central government to consider legalizing sports betting as a means of detecting match- and spot-fixing and thus preserving sports integrity.

There’s a growing push within India’s legal community to modernize the country’s gambling rules. Last month, Balbir Singh Chauhan, a retired justice and current chairman of the Law Commission, told a seminar that the Commission’s preliminary investigation of the impact of legal betting suggested it was better for the government “to regulate the activity, not seek to stop it completely.”

Asia’s race betting monopolies have launched a fresh push to convince law enforcement agencies to shield their comfy betting fiefdoms against interlopers.

On Friday, the Asian Racing Federation (ARF) announced that it had inked a memorandum of understanding with the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) to combat international betting operators who dare to compete with the racing monopolies in ARF member nations.

The ARF, whose 21 members include the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), also announced the launch of its Anti-Illegal Betting Task Force (AIBTF), something the ARF has been pushing for since HKJC CEO Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges proposed its formation at the 36th Asian Racing Conference in January 2016.

Tellingly, the HKJCs head of security Martin Purbrick has been appointed chair of the AIBTF, which plans to share information between members and with governments and law enforcement agencies to uphold “the integrity of the sport.” And hey, if this helps uphold the integrity of the HKJC’s bottom line, all the better.