Kino players look set to get clobbered by gaming tax
The government is now aiming to cover much of the gap that it had been intending to plug by introducing value-added tax on private education with a tax on games of chance.
Sources say that the Finance Ministry is considering taxing the numerical lottery game Kino at 5 cents per entry. This measure is expected to fetch an estimated 205 million euros thanks to annual entries totaling some 4.1 billion. That would offset about half of the cost of not introducing VAT on tuition.
Therefore, besides taxing winners’ earnings, the state will impose a tax on every punter, regardless of whether they win or not. A senior Finance Ministry official said the legal side (i.e. the contract with OPAP) will be studied to see whether this is feasible.
Other offsetting measures being proposed include a VAT hike on beef from 13 to 23 percent.
