The Ministry of Finance just issued a draft replacing Decree No. 06/2017/ND-CP dated January 24, 2017 on business of betting on horse racing, dog racing and international soccer betting business, and the Ministry of Finance is the organizer perform bidding to select enterprises providing this service.
However, so far, no enterprise has been allowed to operate in football betting. The reason is considered to originate from Decree 06’s unreasonable provisions. To be more specific, the Decree require that in order to pilot the international soccer betting business, enterprise must have: (i) a minimum charter capital of VND 1,000 billion or equivalent; (ii) have investment plans in technological systems, technical equipment, business software to ensure its modernity and consistency to be upgraded easily and operated accurately, safely and stably; (iii) have a feasible business plan on international soccer betting, methods and locations for selling tickets in conformable to the law ... According to the Ministry of Finance, with the low frequency of organizing bet placing, while investment capital is large, investors will hardly be able to recover investment capital in the pilot period of 5 years. Therefore, organizing bidding to select enterprises is not easy.
Therefore, in this Draft, Ministry of Finance proposed expanding the list of matches and tournaments that are allowed to place bets. The criteria for matches including regularity, openess, transparency and watched by many fans, are football leagues that organized by FIFA or a member football federation of FIFA. And this can be implemented stably during 5 years of pilot running period of international soccer betting business.At the same time,conditions for selecting enterprises for pilot international football betting business are also fixed.
The draft also supplement specific contents and requirements that the enterprise need to implement within the international football betting business plan so that the enterprises have clear and transparent information when preparing bidding documents and prepare bidding grading scales, criteria for evaluating bids of enterprises according to method of social benefits, state benefits specified in Article 58 of the Law on Bidding, in which the enterprise shall propose to submit to state budget at the highest level and in compliance with the selected investment plan and business plan.
Besides, according to the draft, players can pay in the form of bank accounts, e-wallets or pre-paid mobile cards (currently players are only allowed to place bet via phone and pay for tickets via bank account