PAGCOR: Cleansing continues, another IGL license cancelled
THE Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation on Sunday said it is continuously cleansing the ranks of its Internet Gaming Licensees or IGLs, formerly called POGOS, to weed out irregularities and criminal activities.
PAGCOR Chairman and CEO Alejandro Tengco said that from the original 46 firms that were granted licenses under his administration last year, the number is down to 42 active licensees now after the cancellation last week of another license, while three others have been suspended.
“Despite the lower number of IGLs and service providers today, we are proud to say that we collect more fees from them compared with the previous administration,” he said.
Each IGL pays a guarantee fee of US$100,000 monthly or 2% of their gross gaming revenues, whichever is higher.
They also pay between US$25,000 and US$100,000 monthly in administrative fees, depending on the size of their operations.
Aside from the IGLs, Tengco said PAGCOR has also issued permits to 20 Service Providers and 14 permits for Special Classes of BPOs.
The service providers are charged US$85,000 monthly, while Special Class BPOs pay US$10,000 monthly.
Chairman Tengco said “during the previous administration, no administrative fees were being collected from POGOs, while service providers were only charged application fees of varying amounts. Special Class BPOs were not paying anything at all”.
The PAGCOR chief added there were 63 POGO licensees during the previous administration aside from 231 service providers and four Special Classes of BPOs.
He said most of the anomalies before were traced to the service providers.
In 2019, at the height of legal POGO operations, PAGCOR was able to collect 7.9 billion from its licensees while in 2023, after the number of IGLs and service providers were whittled down, the state gaming firm was still able to collect Php5.2 billion.
This year, PAGCOR said it expects to generate Php6.5 billion from the fewer IGLs and service providers remaining.
