ATG fine reduced by Swedish Court of Appeal

Sweden’s ATG has been handed a reduced fine of SEK3 million by the Swedish Gambling Authority following a Court of Appeal ruling.

The operator was initially issued a SEK6 million fine and a warning in November 2022 for anti-money laundering failures.

The regulatory action followed an investigation by the Spelinspektionen in the autumn of 2021, which examined ATG’s anti-money laundering (AML) compliance.

According to the regulator, ATG had failed to carry out customer due diligence for eight customers between 2019 and 2021, and had not worked in a sufficiently proactive and risk-based manner to ensure that customer knowledge was up-to-date and sufficient to be able to assess and counteract the risk of the company being used for money laundering and terrorist financing.

The regulator believed that the deficiencies were systematic and repeated, and were therefore serious enough to warrant a warning and fine.

ATG appealed the decision to the Administrative Court in Linköping, which ruled that, although there were certain deficiencies in ATG’s handling of the eight customer cases in question, these were not of a serious enough nature to justify a warning and a penalty fee.

This decision was subsequently appealed at the Court of Appeal, which this week ruled in favour of Spelinspektionen.

Whilst the court did agree with the regulator, the court reduced the fine from SEK6 million to SEK3 million, noting that the limited number of customers affected meant that the violations could not be considered systematic.