Sweden: ATG fined three million kronor for AML breaches
Swedish betting giant Aktiebolaget Trav och Galopp (ATG) has been ordered to pay a three-million-kronor (around €260,000) fine after the Court of Appeal in Jönköping found the company had seriously violated anti-money-laundering rules.
According to local media Nyheterna, which reported the decision this week, the court upheld the Swedish Gambling Authority’s (Spelinspektionen) position that ATG failed to carry out sufficient checks to prevent money-laundering and terrorist financing. The judgment reverses an earlier decision by the Administrative Court that had sided with the company.
“The breach concerns fundamental customer-due-diligence obligations, and the transactions involved substantial sums of money,” said presiding judge Louise Millqvist in a press statement quoted by Nyheterna.
The decision brings a long-running dispute between ATG and Sweden’s gambling regulator to a close and adds to the company’s growing list of challenges amid falling revenues, tighter regulation, and mounting pressure from unlicensed competitors.
Regulatory battle
Spelinspektionen originally imposed a six-million-kronor penalty on ATG in November 2022, citing serious shortcomings in the company’s monitoring systems for suspicious transactions. At the time, the authority said ATG had not done enough to minimise the risk that its platforms could be used for money-laundering or the financing of terrorism, reported Nyheterna.
ATG appealed, and the Administrative Court overturned the sanction, arguing that the regulator’s decision was disproportionate. That ruling briefly lifted the penalty, but the higher court’s verdict this week reinstates the sanction, though at half the original amount.
For ATG, the ruling represents both a reputational and financial blow. While three million kronor (around €260,000, less than one percent of one quarter’s profit) is a manageable sum for the operator, the symbolism of being formally censured for compliance failings could weigh heavily at a time when the company has been positioning itself as a responsible industry leader.
Financial headwinds and shifting market
The penalty arrives just months after ATG reported a drop in both revenues and profits for the first half of 2025.ATG said net gaming revenues for the second quarter fell 2% to 1,358 million SEK (120 million EUR), while total revenues were down 2% to 1,540 million SEK (136 million EUR).
For the first half of the year, net gaming revenues decreased 5% to 2,566 million SEK (226 million EUR).
Chief executive Hasse Lord Skarplöth attributed the weaker performance to Sweden’s higher gambling tax, which rose from 18 percent to 22 percent in mid-2024, as well as to lower household spending. “The higher gambling tax alone increases costs by 105 million SEK,” the company said at the time.
Despite the financial squeeze, Skarplöth insisted the operator remained resilient, noting that customer numbers had held steady at about 1.4 million over the past year.
Reforming the market
Beyond its financial results, ATG has tried to cast itself as a moral anchor in a gambling market that has become increasingly fragmented since Sweden ended its state monopoly system in 2019.
In a report published last year, the company warned of a surge in unlicensed gambling, estimating that between 14 and 29 percent of all gambling in Sweden now takes place outside the regulated system, a far cry from the government’s target of a 90 percent channelisation rate to licensed operators.
ATG’s study, Gambling Under the Radar, called for tougher enforcement against black-market operators, including IP and DNS blocking, a redefinition of what constitutes gambling “available to Swedish players,” and tighter controls on bonuses. “We could no longer sit on our hands and watch customers get hurt in the unlicensed market,” Skarplöth said at the time, arguing that legal operators were being unfairly constrained by stricter domestic rules while illegal sites flourished.
That narrative, portraying ATG as both regulator-compliant and consumer-protective, now sits uneasily alongside the latest court ruling, which accuses the company of falling short of its own obligations.
However, ATG’s regulatory push bore its fruit in late September, when the government received a landmark proposal to expand the criminalisation of unlicensed gambling, a reform that ATG and other licensed operators have strongly endorsed. The plan, led by investigator Marcus Isgren, would replace the so-called “direction criterion” with a new “participation criterion”, meaning the law would apply whenever Swedish consumers take part in a game, regardless of language, currency or marketing. ATG hailed the proposal as a decisive step to close loopholes that have allowed offshore companies to target Swedish players.
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