The renewal of the licenses for horse racing betting

On 13th September 2007 the European Court of Justice ruled, in the C 260/04 case, that, by renewing the 329 licenses for horse racing betting operations without opening each of them to competitive tendering, Italy had failed to meet the current obligations of Articles 43 and 49 of the EC Treaty, and that, in particular, it had violated the general principle of transparency and the obligation to guarantee an adequate level of publicity.

In 2008 the Italian authority approved a law that determines that the illegally renewed licenses would be reallocated through a tendering process and that the existing licenses would become inoperative following their reallocation and, in any case, at the latest by 31st January 2009. The Commission believes that these regulations would have been adequate to comply with the Court's ruling. It turns out however that the new license contracts have still not been concluded and that, in fact, the said law has been modified in order to extend their effectiveness until 31st March 2009.

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