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AUSTRAC Launches Civil Penalty Proceedings Against Mounties

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AUSTRAC has launched Federal Court civil penalty proceedings against Mount Pritchard District and Community Club (Mounties), for alleged serious and systemic non-compliance with Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) laws.

AUSTRAC alleges that Mounties contravened the AML/CTF Act, providing gaming services to its customers in circumstances where it had not adopted and maintained an AML CTF programme in compliance with the AML/CTF Rules.

AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas said AUSTRAC alleges failures in Mounties’ approach to its anti-money laundering obligations have left it open to criminal exploitation.

“Mounties is one of the largest and most profitable club groups in NSW. It owns 10 venues, 8 of which operate approximately 1,400 poker machines and it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from money gambled on those machines,” Mr Thomas said.

“This is a big company with an even bigger responsibility to ensure its clubs are managing the risks that criminals can run dirty money through its gaming machines.

“AUSTRAC’s 2024 Money Laundering in Australia National Risk Assessment identified pubs and clubs as a medium risk sector, but when those businesses are exposed to cash, especially in circumstances where known money laundering risks are not being managed, the risk increases.”

“A business operating at this scale, in a cash intensive sector, is exposed to a high degree of money laundering risk. In 2022 for example, the NSW Crime Commission released its Project Islington report which determined that billions of the approximately $95b gambled in NSW poker machines in 2021-22 was likely to be dirty money.”

AUSTRAC alleges Mounties AML/CTF programme:

• did not have an adequate risk assessment

• did not contain appropriate staff risk awareness training

• did not contain appropriate risk based systems and controls in its transaction monitoring programme

• did not include appropriate risk based systems and controls in its enhanced customer due diligence processes

• was not subject to an independent review that met the requirements of the Rules

• and that Mounties failed to appropriately monitor a number of its customers with a view to identifying, mitigating and managing the money laundering risk that Mounties faced.

AUSTRAC also alleges Mounties failed to appropriately maintain its AML/CTF Programme, with aspects of its programme outsourced to a third party provider, Betsafe – which also provides AML/CTF programmes to a number of other pubs and clubs.

“Like many other AUSTRAC reporting entities, Mounties outsources aspects of its AML/CTF program but what it can’t outsource is its AML/CTF obligations.”

“Relying on third party providers doesn’t absolve a business of its obligations under the AML/CTF Act. If a reporting entity outsources key parts of its program to a service that is not fit for purpose – especially without proper oversight or resourcing – they run a real risk of non-compliance.

“All reporting entities, regardless of size, must stay actively involved in how their AML/CTF program is designed, implemented and monitored and I would say the same thing to other pubs and clubs who think bringing in a provider is a set and forget solution.”

AUSTRAC also alleges a number of specific instances where Mounties failed to appropriately monitor specific customers, despite the money laundering risks they presented.

“Customer due diligence and transaction monitoring in a club that processes hundreds of millions of dollars a year through its poker machines, a significant amount of which is cash, is going to require a robust approach when it comes to verifying a customer’s source of funds,” said Mr Thomas.

It is now a matter for the Federal Court of Australia to determine whether Mounties contravened the Act and, if so, what orders to make.

The post AUSTRAC Launches Civil Penalty Proceedings Against Mounties appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

Australia

Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW

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Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.

The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.

Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.

It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.

Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.

It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.

The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.

The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

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Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties

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The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.

The Court ordered:

Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.

Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.

His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.

The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.

ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.

“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.

“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”

ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.

In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:

“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”

Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that

“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that

“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”

The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

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PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale

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Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.

“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.

Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:

• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.

• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.

• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.

“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.

“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.

The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

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