Home / Poker News April 2014 / Vladimir Putin to Turn Crimea into Gambling Zone
Vladimir Putin to Turn Crimea into Gambling Zone
Posted by: Mark Baldwing - Wed, 2014-04-30 07:14
What does a 21st century dictator – his nuclear weapons allowing him to frolic as he pleases - do with his freshly conquered lands? He turns them into gambling hotspots of course…what else would he do?
Apparently that’s exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to do with the recently annexed Crimea. In Russia, gambling and poker are only allowed within specially created gambling zones, set up in the wake of tough anti-gambling and
online poker laws ushered in by Putin. Currently, there are such gambling zones set up in Kaliningrad, Krasnodar, Vladivostok and Altai, and although there probably is some gambling action going down in those places, it doesn’t seem to be worthy of the attention of the international gambling press.
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The whole “Crimea: a Russian gambling paradise” idea started off on March 27, when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asked Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak to look into the feasibility of a special gambling zone being set up there with the aim to kick-start the ailing economy of the area.
The investigation has apparently yielded a positive result, as President Vladimir Putin followed through on the idea, presenting a draft law to the State Duma aiming to allow Crimea’s new (Kremlin-appointed) authorities to choose a location for the gambling project.
Whether the State Duma will indeed pass the proposed law may be a moot point, since apparently Putin pretty much defines what the Duma can or cannot do these days…The likelihood of the legislators signing off on Putin’s plans is obviously very high, not just because of the above said reason, but also because the investments needed are expected to be wholly covered by various international gambling operators, the identities of whom have not yet been revealed.
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