Russia’s President Vladimir Putin wants casinos in the Crimea and has presented to the State Duma a bill for creating in the breakaway Ukranian republic a fifth national gambling zone.
The legislation is expected to result in the designation of a single resort area similar to the restrictive enclaves the lower house of the parliament established in 2009 when casinos were banned from Russia’s major cities.
“Casinos and gambling zones will not be scattered over Crimea. Everything will be located in one place,” the republic’s acting president, Sergey Aksyonov, told news agency Itar-Tass.
Legalization is supported in the Kremlin as a means to boost the Crimea’s foundering economy, which has left the local government heavily in debt and dependent on Russia, which backed its secession from the Ukraine, for substantial loans.
Opening Sochi to casinos also was considered at one point to bail out investors in the money-losing 2014 Winter Olympics, but the idea did not enjoy Mr Putin’s support and was scrapped.
Russia was home to a thriving gambling industry before the 2009 crackdown. Some 12, 000 casinos and machine gaming parlors were running, 80% of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The market at its peak was generating US$5.5 billion in annual revenues from an estimated 350,000 slot machines and 5,000 table games.
The four zones that replaced it have struggled to attract investment. Envisioned by the government as multifaceted tourist destinations, only one, Kaliningrad in European Russia, has actively expanded. In 2010, the Azov City zone in the south was moved to a more desirable Black Sea location. The Far East zone near Vladivostok is expected have some appeal for Chinese and Korean gamblers and two casinos have been proposed there to date, one backed by Macau casino magnate Lawrence Ho, one by Cambodia’s NagaCorp. The other zone is in the Altai region of Central Asia.
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