The operation of the betting company B2B GAMING SERVICES (MALTA) LTD, which has been licensed and provided betting services in the Greek market under the BETSHOP.GR brand, has been suspended due to tax violations. The company claims that its customer service bank account has been seized by the tax authorities, resulting in the suspension of its operation.

It should be noted that in recent months the AADE had carried out extensive checks on online providers offering betting services and, as the report had made known, serious tax violations had been found and fines had been imposed.

At the same time there are also pending issues with the payment of instalments to the EEPC in the context of the licensing of companies.

The announcement of BETSHOP.GR states:

“Our Company is in the unfortunate position to announce that, due to the sudden and abusive seizure of its customer service bank account by the tax authorities, we are forced to suspend operations until the issue has been rectified.

The trust that has characterized our relationship with the users of our services from the very first moment, as well as our sense of responsibility towards our partners, requires us to disclose the following:

The tax dispute, for which the authorities imposed the seizure of the above mentioned account of the Company, concerns the calculation of our tax obligations for the fiscal years 2013 and 2014 and, mainly, the determination of the withholding tax on the players’ winnings.

That is, the tax administration determined that we should have withheld more tax from our customers. The authorities are seeking money from us, WHICH WE DID NOT RECEIVE from our customers.

The competent authority, calculated the said tax arbitrarily, and flagrantly ignored internal correspondence from the same department which agreed with the method of calculation applied by our Company. In all subsequent tax audits (for the years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019), this method of calculation was found to be absolutely correct.

For all the above valid and legitimate reasons, our Company has appealed to the Council of State with an appeal and we are awaiting the decision.

Despite the fact, however, that the court decision of the Council of State is pending, which will decide the legality of the tax assessment against us, and also disregarding the fact that the competent services of the AADE have already recognized as correct and legal the way of calculating the tax payable, the tax administration has imposed a complete electronic seizure of the customer’s bank account, with the result that we have absolutely no practical possibility of continuing our operation, unable to carry out transactions with the users of the online services m

We wish to assure our customers that, in any case, we will take all necessary steps to ensure that this issue does not affect in the slightest any transactions they have carried out to date. We thank you for your trust which we respect and honor since the beginning of our activity in Greece and we will continue with the same zeal to serve the vision of providing reliable and innovative technology services”.