The head of Sweden’s gambling regulatory agency is exiting his post ahead of schedule, prompting concerns that his absence will impact the country’s push to liberalize its online gambling market. On Friday, Sweden’s Gambling Regulatory Authority (Lotteriinspektionen) announced that general director Hakan Hallstedt (pictured) had been appointed a judge in Blekinge District Court, a position he will take up on May 15. Hallstedt will resign as Lotteriinspektionen director at the end of March. Hallstedt, who has headed up Lotteriinspektionen since September 2008, was originally supposed to step down when his current term ended this September. But Hallstedt apparently felt the…

Swedish operator association Branschföreningen för Onlinespel (BOS) has confirmed that Apple is to reinstate gambling applications for a number of major operators to the country’s App Store. As reported by iGaming Business, technology giant Apple in March removed the apps due to complaints from the Lotteriinspektionen national regulatory body. The regulator advised Apple that unlicensed operators were targeting players in Sweden. However, an intervention from the BOS will now enable Apple to reinstate the apps for players in the country to access. The BOS said it sent Apple a letter explaining that the apps were not in breach of Swedish…

Eurasia Net – Just about everyone knows that the FIFA World Cup football tournament gets underway June 12 in Brazil. But in a parallel football universe, a little-known tournament has already been completed, and the champion is a land that stretches across portions of France and Italy. The alternative tournament featured 12 teams representing internationally unrecognized nations, places like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, separatist territories that are formally part of the Republic of Georgia, as well as Nagorno-Karabakh, the focal point of an unsettled conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Teams representing Darfur, a strife-torn region of western Sudan, Kurdistan and…

iGaming Business – Sweden-based mobile gaming start-up Kiggit is considering a move into real-money gaming after the successful launch of a social football application. Kiggit, which went live around one month ago, allows players to predict football matches, create social betting slips and challenge friends. The firm is already set to introduce Kiggits, a virtual currency that can be used on the game, but is now considering the option of integrating a real-currency offering in the future. Other features currently in development include leaderboards, live scores, in-game statistics, live betting options and a chat feature for interaction before, during and…

Poker News – According to a note published by Sweden’s monopolistic company Svenska Spel, the package of “responsible gambling measures” implemented only six months ago resulted in a 6.2 percent profit loss. According to a report on 2014 Q1, “net gaming revenues decreased by SEK 186 million compared with the same period last year, moving from SEK 2.480 million to 2.293 million” and brought the Swedish gambling group an operating profit of SEK 1.243 million — SEK 83 million smaller than in 2013. “The decrease in revenues was expected,” commented Svenska Spel CEO Lennart Käll, who also added that the…

Poker News – Sweden’s authorities have indicted 10 people for what the Värmlands District Court described as a “major fraud case” involving an online poker scandal which occurred between 2007 and 2011. The incident supposedly involved a large number of players active on Sweden’s gambling company Svenska Spel and a number of other operators. According to a statement released on Wednesday by Sweden’s online gambling regulator Lotteriinspektionen, between 2007 and 2011 the 10 people involved in the court case gained unauthorized access to the operators’ databases and collected a large number of players’ personal data such as email addresses, password…