France’s National Sanctions Committee (CNS) has fined licensed online sports betting operator GU €20,000 and ordered a two-month suspension of its betting activities over breaches of French and European asset-freezing rules designed to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. Two senior executives at the company were also fined and temporarily barred from managing activities in the sector, following a case referred to the CNS by France’s gambling regulator, the ANJ, last year.
The former chief executive, identified only as Monsieur AB, who also headed the parent company supplying staff to the operator, received a two-month prohibition from managing online betting activities alongside a €20,000 fine. Compliance officer Madame BG was barred from management activities in the sector for two months and fined €5,000. No penalties were imposed on the company’s legal officer or its owner and principal shareholder, and the CNS anonymised the individuals involved to avoid disproportionate harm under procedural rules.
The case centred on a customer account opened on December 3, 2023, by an individual listed on France’s register of persons subject to an asset-freezing order. GU’s systems generated alerts the same day, but the account was validated 11 days later, on December 14. The ANJ notified the operator and opened an administrative investigation on January 3, 2024, and the account was closed the following day.
Systems and Notification Failures
The CNS concluded that GU lacked adequate systems and controls to ensure the rapid and effective enforcement of asset-freezing requirements, finding that the account should never have been opened given the alerts already generated. The committee determined the operator had breached articles L.562-4-1 and R.562-1 of the French monetary and financial code, describing the obligation as one of result – requiring operators to guarantee that prohibited accounts are not created rather than simply attempt to prevent them.
GU also failed to notify the Minister of Economy, Finance and Industrial, Energy and Digital Sovereignty about the incident, both when a suspected human error produced a false positive on December 3 and again after the account was closed on January 4. The CNS rejected a separate allegation that the operator had processed transactions without verifying customer identity or purpose, citing insufficient evidence. This kind of screening failure sits at the centre of the risk indicators regulators expect operators to monitor, as outlined in FATF’s gambling risk guidance.
Broader Compliance Context
The CNS upheld the sanctions in July, though the ANJ only published the ruling this week. Earlier this month, the ANJ issued new player-fraud guidance for French gambling operators, encouraging stronger terms and conditions, improved record-keeping and higher technical compliance standards. The case follows other recent ANJ enforcement action, including a separate fine against an operator over problem-gambling controls, and echoes AML enforcement trends seen elsewhere in Europe, such as recent Swedish penalties over anti-money laundering failures.
Source: Focus Gaming News
Petra Vanhoof has spent the better part of a decade following the shifting tides of gambling regulation across Europe and beyond. She came up through the compliance side of the industry before pivoting to writing, which gives her a grounded, no-nonsense perspective on the rules, loopholes, and political maneuvering that shape how operators actually do business. She is particularly drawn to the gap between what regulators say and what the market ends up doing in response.