Less than six weeks before the UK’s anticipated withdrawal from the European Union (EU), the executive director of the government of Gibraltar’s gaming division has called for cooperation between European regulators post-Brexit.
Speaking on the Brexit panel at SBC’s Casino Beats conference Wednesday afternoon, Andrew Lyman said he hoped “economic sense will eventually prevail over political posturing,” but that he accepted that “sometimes political posturing prevails over common sense.”
He said despite Gibraltar having stringent rules around technology locations, it had chosen to be flexible with its B2C businesses in the runup to the UK’s potential exit from the EU because it didn’t want its “big B2C operators to be faced with a binary choice of either stay or go.”
Gibraltar has seen migration to other regulatory jurisdictions, such as Malta, in the past few years, although Lyman pointed out that some operators have kept “a foot in both camps” while others are “trusting to luck and hoping that Brexit doesn’t happen.”
With the latter looking less likely by the day, Lyman is hopeful that a collaborative relationship can be established with EU regulators after the UK leaves the union.
“The whole issue could be sorted out post-Brexit, if that occurs, so that there is cooperation between the regulatory authorities in the different European jurisdictions and the UK and Gibraltar,” he said.
Pointing to the EU’s current drive to breakdown data localisation across the region, he also argued that “governments should only be insisting on data localisation if it was for national security purposes, for example.
“Now, with the UK and Gibraltar being third countries,” Lyman asked, “where does that leave us?”
While pragmatism prevailed on the panel, which also featured RSM partner Vladimiro Comodini and CurrencyTransfer COO Paul Plewman, there was also a clear sense that the unknowns would cloud judgement until after the withdrawal date.
“Since [the referendum] it’s been as chaotic as you’ve read in the papers from one day to the next,” Plewman said. “The appetite, and therefore the demand, for Sterling has moved with the current opinion. That will naturally continue right up until the break. So we are still in that natural state of flux where there is still considerable risk on both sides.”
However, Lyman said he was optimistic that his jurisdiction would be able to leverage off new UK treaties with economies further afield, including Asia and the BRICs countries.
“Gibraltar is not a jurisdiction on life support” he said. “There is a shift of emphasis, but I remain quite optimistic about that.”
