The body is made up of professional civil servants advising the government on the IR (Integrated Resorts) Implementation Bill. The report was the result of a series of meetings held by the Secretariat to discuss casino regulation in Japan.
The final document carried little surprise from what had been made public from the Secretariat’s meetings. The document should now be used by the Japanese government as a reference while drafting the IR Implementation Bill.
The panel report suggested setting an "upper limit” to the size of casino floors in Japan, but it did not suggest what that limit should be. Some local media reports had previously mentioned the possibility of casino floors being restricted to 15,000
The report also suggested limits to the number of integrated resorts allowed to be developed in Japan. The panel did not suggest a figure, but noted that each integrated resort should include only one casino, Japanese media reported.
The document proposed that money collected from a gross gaming revenue tax should be divided equally between the central government and municipalities hosting casino resorts.
The Japanese government and the Secretariat have made frequent mention of Singapore as an important reference point regarding casino regulation. The city-state levies 15 % gaming tax on
The document also proposed capping the number of weekly and the number of monthly casino visits for Japanese nationals, with the maximum number of entries to be decided at a later stage. People under the age of 20 should not be allowed inside casinos, according to the framework report.
Under a best-case scenario, the IR Implementation Bill might be passed by the country’s parliament in the 2017 extraordinary session starting in the autumn.
Source: GMB / GGR Asia
