Don’t look now, but the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma’s real-money online gambling plans took a step closer to reality after securing a gaming license from Isle of Man (IOM) regulators.

On Thursday, the Iowa Tribe announced that Ioway Internet Gaming Enterprise Limited had been issued an online gaming license by the IOM Gambling Supervision Commission earlier this month. Ioway, which was registered in the IOM in January, is co-owned by the tribe and its sketchy online technology partner, the Florida-based Universal Entertainment Group (UEG).

UEG has been trying to launch a tribal online gambling site for several years now, having first hooked up with Oklahoma’s Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes on a deal to launch PokerTribes.com, a real-money online gambling site that would accept customers from outside the United States.

That highly controversial deal fell through before the site took a single wager, leading to reports that the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) was investigating UEG, whose owner Fred Khalilian has been the subject of multi-million-dollar deceptive telemarketing judgments by the Federal Trade Commission.