A long-delayed rewrite of gambling laws to permit online gambling in Mexico are a bad bet to be approved before 2018, according to the head of the country’s gambling industry association.

Last week, Miguel Angel Ochoa Sanchez, president of AIEJA, told Mexican media outlet Milenio.com that he didn’t see Mexico’s new Law of Games and Sweepstakes passing in the current legislative session that concludes on August 31, 2018, one month after national elections.

Sanchez’s position is a turnaround from comments he made last summer in which he predicted that the law would be approved in 2016. The Mexican legislature’s lower house approved the law – which covers everything from online gambling to the country’s often shambolic land-based casino industry – in December 2014 but the Senate is proving a much steeper hill to climb.

Sanchez complained that senators “ask for reports on why things happen in states, what are the casino issues … instead of asking, they should do their work, they have important legislation in their hands.”

Read more about the possibility of online gambling in Mexico at Calvin Ayre.