December 10, 2013
Phill Brear, commissioner for the Gibraltar Gambling Commission who issued a widely criticised
response to the BetFred rigged games issue, recently made a barely-concealed threat against gambling expert Eliot Jacobson whose testimony had been crucial in demonstrating the validity of the rigged claim, and who had suggested that Brear may have come under pressure from those parts of the gambling industry that could have been disadvantaged by a report unfavourable to BetFred:
11th June 2013, 06:21 PMBrear's e-mail to me contained the following threat:
I have no wish to have a public slanging match on your role in this matter and your defective logic so I suggest you make a diplomatic and tactical retreat.
So just to be clear: here we have a formerly highly-regarded gambling regulator telling a determined critic that he should shut up, with clearly implicit negative consequences if he declined to so do.
That might be considered surprising if we hadn't read Mr. Brear's previous description of the matter as a "hysterical witch-hunt"; that his response to a petition logged (which he described as "ludicrous") was a curiosity on his part to see the people who would "come out from behind their shield(s) of anonymity", in other words identify themselves and take the potential consequences; that he absurdly claimed that a member (unnamed) of the online discussion "pretends to be his own mother"; that he made contradictory statements, about both a game which apparently had had "millions and millions of plays" but where "the customer loss/operator gain is not significant", which seem to be completely irreconcilable positions, and the player, whose behaviour did not prevent his testimony from being potentially "accurate or useful" but which was actually "close to useless" - again, completely contradictory positions; that he extraordinarily claimed that the UK Gambling Commission, who had apparently issued some comments, was "now aligned with the cheating side of this argument"; and many more hyperbolic statements besides.
So, bad form though it may be for an apparently reputable online gambling regulator to be seen issuing thinly-veiled threats against esteemed members of the gambling community on the basis of fair and corroborated criticism, on this occasion it might not be all that surprising.
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