In a recent article published online by various online sources such as Reuters, reported while citing an ex MGA employee, Valery Atanasov, claiming that regulator issued gaming licenses to a bunch of gambling operators without doing the "sealing" action on hardware which is one of the main strict standards of the authority now outdated and replaced with a more secured one.
The allegations stated that the MGA had recently been sealing all the hardware used by malta based gaming companies so that money laundering is prevented together with other illegal practices. Mr. Atanasov was one of the employees who was in charge of such duty and he told Reuters that the procedure was solely used to pre define who acquire the licence and who doesn't.
Even though Mr. Atanasov did not present any evidence about his allegations he continued to tell Reuters that there was this one time where he refused to seal some hardware at some offices from various companies because what had been shown within the hardware map was not matching the actual position of the hardware. Despite this, Mr. Atanasov is claiming that the MGA still granted licences to these companies.
The authority currently has a pending case in front of the Industrial Tribunal about his dismissal from the same authority, a decision which was taken by an independent disciplinary board.
In a press release from the Malta Gaming Authority, the regulator categorically denied the allegations and explained how that procedure is now obsolete and the sealing of hardware was not a critical procedure on which the license adjudication was based on.
"The comments centre around an outdated process called ‘sealing’, a legacy and internal (non-critical) procedure which has since been discontinued in light of technological developments and innovations e.g. cloud solutions. On the other hand, the process of tagging (of equipment) was retained for inventory control purposes. The Authority employs various other procedures which include third party technical audits and spot checks, data extractions, 24/7 CCTV monitoring at data centres, lab certificates of critical components (e.g. servers), website/data centre traffic monitoring and verification of replication procedures for data not hosted in Malta."
In the midst of a general election in Malta, this has come to no surprise following an array, of what the leader of the Labour party Joseph Muscat is describing as, spinners and scaremongering attacks with unfounded allegations being done on international level to disrupt Malta's good reputation in Europe.
For the sake of online gambling, let's try to keep out politics from this booming and flourishing industry and leave Malta doing what has done impeccably during these last few years.
You can view and download the official press release from the Malta Gaming Authority here.
