TGP Europe Ltd hit with £316,250 by UKGC

The UK Gambling Commission is going through a period of heightened regulatory activity that has seen fines issued to various operators. In nearly all cases over the past weeks, the watchdog cited regulatory failures pertaining to anti-money laundering (AML) and social responsibility as the basis of the penalties.

The latest entity to be registered with the regulator and hit on the market is TGP Europe Limited which was handed down a £316,250 penalty precisely because of social responsibility shortcomings and AML failures. The regulator detailed both types of offences and offered a breakdown of the specificity of the cases.

In the case of social responsibility failures, TGP Europe Limited allowed customers to continue gambling even after they triggered a number of safer gambling alerts. Those alerts were left unheeded with the operator not intervening, the UKGC contended.

TGP allowed automated rather than human interaction to take precedence in those cases when the safer gambling alerts were triggered, and an action from the operator was finally elicited. According to the watchdog, there were no sufficient efforts to assess the interactions and see if there is room for improvement – such as telephone interaction, for example.

When it came to AML failures, the regulator once again pointed out three cases. Firstly, there weren’t money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment practices that adequately assessed the risks and practices. According to the UKGC, TGP Europe Limited did not sufficiently check if customers were providing false or stolen identification documentation.

There were no adequate considerations and mitigation of money laundering risks either. Another issue that the regulator cited was the lack of effective policies and procedures related to due diligence in the cases of white-label agreements. Because of these points, the regulator has concluded that the appropriate financial penalty that the company needs to pay is £316,250.

TGP Europe Limited has 19 websites in the United Kingdom. The company is just one of the latest to be subjected to regulatory and enforcement action by the watchdog. Just last week, the UKGC issued a massive penalty to William Hill Group in the United Kingdom, hitting the operator with £19.2m.

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