Belarus to boost gambling industry

The new plan, which was approved last week, includes creating a monitoring center that will keep close track of casinos and other gaming venues across the country. It is aimed at decentralizing the gambling industry in Belarus, and ensuring its financial transparency.

"We have every opportunity to gain a leading position in this sensitive sphere against a background of the changes in the Russian and Ukrainian legislation," Vremya Novostei quoted Lukashenko as saying.

He said Russia and Ukraine had been forced to strengthen the laws on casinos because they slipped out of government control and were divided up between different criminal groups, but Belarus would avoid this by keeping a watchful eye on gambling businesses.

"Everything will be fine here if those who are responsible for controlling this type of activity, civil servants, do not get mixed up in it thereby destroying and criminalizing it," Lukashenko said.

Many experts view the move, which could bring in visitors and money from its former Soviet neighbors, as part of efforts to drag Belarus out of economic slump. "The gambling industry can and must become an additional source of building up the budget by means of taxes, and will help creating new jobs, and attract tourists and investment," the president said.

Russia in July 2009 ordered the closure of all gaming establishments except in four specially designated areas - in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, south Siberia's Altai Territory, Primorye in the Far East, and in southern Russia - where infrastructure has yet to be developed to attract gamblers on the model of Las Vegas and Atlantic City in the United States.

Ukraine's parliament temporarily banned casinos in June 2009, after a fire broke out in a casino in Dnepropetrovsk, to the southeast of Kiev, killing nine people and injuring 11. The Supreme Rada gave the government three months to draft a law on regulating the gaming business in Ukraine, but no action has been taken and the ban remains in effect.