Russia Plans To Turn Crimea Into ‘Next Las Vegas’
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Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has presented a draft law to create a casino zone in Crimea, in the hopes of boosting local revenues and reduce Crimea’s reliance on Moscow.
According to the BBC, Crimea would become the fifth designated gambling zone in Russia, after Primorye, in the far east, Sibirskaya Moneta, in central Siberia, and Yantarnaya in Kaliningrad, by the Baltic Sea.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has presented a draft law to create a casino zone in Crimea, in the hopes of boosting local revenues and reduce Crimea’s reliance on Moscow.
According to the BBC, Crimea would become the fifth designated gambling zone in Russia, after Primorye, in the far east, Sibirskaya Moneta, in central Siberia, and Yantarnaya in Kaliningrad, by the Baltic Sea.
A Crimean gambling centre “stands a good chance of becoming a competitor to such sophisticated territories as Macau, Monaco and Las Vegas,” claimed Crimea’s Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliev on Monday.
The gambling zone, treated as a special economic zone, is intended to lift Crimea “at least to the average Russian level, socially and fiscally,” without requiring additional state funds, added Viktor Zvagelsky, deputy head of the State Duma’s Economic Policy Committee.
However, some industry experts warned that casinos may not necessarily create immediate benefits for Crimea.
To succeed, casino developments need “large, nearby pools of players who can travel there,” told Andrew Gellatly, the London-based head of global research at industry research group GamblingCompliance, to Bloomberg.
Take the Californians who gamble in nearby Las Vegas and Chinese who flock to the coastal enclave of Macau, he said. “You have nothing like that in Crimea… the peninsula has no road connection at all to the Russian mainland and is far from any major city,” he added.
And while Moscow has discussed plans to build a bridge between its new peninsula and the mainland, that could take several years, Gellatly warned, and even then Crimea remains almost 900 miles from Moscow.
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Several speculators also found it odd that President Putin would approve a casino zone in Crimea despite being vehemently opposed to gambling in the past. In 2009, Russia had decided to ban casinos from Moscow, with Putin having described gambling addiction as worse than even drug or alcohol addiction.
But Crimea is expected to run a $1.5 billion budget deficit this year and may need $2.8 billion of emergency subsidies, an expense the Russian economy can ill afford.
Under Russian law, gambling zones cannot be built on government funds, and must be built through private investment.
