Lady Joker

What is Lady Joker?

Ben Robinson, managing partner at Corfai, argues that the American listing achieved what it was supposed to achieve. The problems came afterwards. “The question was which arm of the K-shaped market Flutter would end up on. We have the answer now. Capital is concentrated in a narrow band of technology names and everything else is being marked on earnings.”

A US listing can improve access to capital without making the underlying business more attractive. London has a capital-markets problem. Gambling has an investment problem. The two overlap, but they are not the same thing.

Frank Fantini, founder and publisher emeritus of Eilers-Fantini, thinks the change began before Covid. “There is a tendency to look at the world as pre-Covid and post-Covid,” he says. “But the decline in gaming began earlier than that with the slowdown in new jurisdictions and new projects.”

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Rossi believes the ISC in Peru is an example of a government implementing new taxes without truly understanding how the industry works, and the potential impacts on channelisation to licensed offerings.

“Peru has been quite successful in channelling customers into the regulated framework,” Rossi comments. “The risk is that this channelisation can decrease in favour of the black market. We know the black market won’t have any consumption tax.

“There should be, in my opinion, a review of the whole ISC or consumption tax framework and find a kind of alignment or a better way to get an income in terms of taxes, but that should be balanced in order to avoid the disruption of businesses and a migration of customers to the illegal market.”

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The pair established Sanum Investments and partnered with Laotian conglomerate ST Group. Baldwin later testified that the investors initially committed around $7.5 million to the venture, which envisaged two casino resorts and several slot clubs.

Their biggest success was Savan Vegas, strategically located near the Friendship Bridge linking Laos with neighboring Thailand across the Mekong River. A planned second resort, Paksong Vegas, was never built.

Within several years, however, the partnership had soured.