The chairman of the board of the Partouche casino group Fabrice Paire expressed his irritation to AFP on Tuesday about an “imbalance” in treatment in favor of Française des Jeux and estimated that the profession “deserved” a policy “with a little more ambition” than the recent law allowing the opening of new casinos.
(AFP / STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN)
This bill definitively adopted last Tuesday authorizes the opening of casinos in municipalities with a national stud farm where at least ten major equestrian events have been organized over the last five years as well as in towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants in border departments. not having casinos.
Concretely, this authorizes four new openings, according to Mr. Paire: Saumur and Arnac-Pompadour for the equestrian side and the intercommunalities of Sedan and Nancy for the other system.
“We are going to be interested in calls for tenders but there is no automatism, the wishes of the city must be compatible with the economic model that we can deploy. We will not go to nothing no matter what the price,” said Mr. Paire.
“What is frankly a shame is that it is not commensurate with what the gaming policy in France should be. There are a lot of white areas where there are no casinos and we would have deserved a policy that was a little more concerted, structured, with a little more ambition,” he lamented.
Especially since according to him, the FDJ is “today the only gaming player which continues to advance in France” with “fairly hegemonic development possibilities” unlike the rest of the gaming sector.
“We thought that its privatization would lead to the State being a little more careful, to a better balance” with the other actors, the opposite is happening, he lamented.
He spoke on the occasion of the publication of the group’s annual turnover which stood at 423.8 million euros between November 2022 and October 2023, an increase of 9% compared to the financial year. previous.
The gross gaming product (GRP), a key indicator of the sector (difference between players’ stakes and their winnings), increased over the same period by 10.2% to 701.5 million euros.
In terms of prospects, the group welcomed the renewal of the Meyrin casino concession in Switzerland, for 20 years from January 1, 2025, as well as the hosting of the World Series of Poker world poker championship in a stadium Parisian at the end of May 2024.
According to Fabrice Paire, the holding of this event is “a good example of the usefulness of gaming clubs in Paris”.
These gaming clubs have been experimented with since 2018 in the capital – where casinos have been banned since 1920 within a 100 km radius, with a single exception for the establishment of Enghien-les-Bains – and the public authorities should decide to here at the end of 2024 of possible sustainability.
Casino operators wish to seize this opportunity to open up “more structured reflection” around the game, in particular by tackling “white zones”.
“There are a lot of places in France with a sufficient population density where a casino installation would be justified”, according to him, citing the examples of “Reims, Laval, Orléans or Le Mans”.
Critics of new casino establishments point out that France already has 40% of the EU’s casinos, without taking into account the risk of gambling addiction.