The Administrative Court in Linköping has overturned an SEK 8 million ($852,867) fine that Spelinspektionen imposed on Roar Vegas Ltd, the Swedish operating entity of MGM-owned LeoVegas Group, ruling that the regulator failed to prove a clear breach of the country’s duty of care rules.
The judgment, issued on 12 June 2026 under case number 3061-25, fully reversed a sanction handed down 15 months earlier. The court found that Spelinspektionen had not produced the unambiguous evidence required to establish a violation of the Gambling Act’s duty of care provisions, and that ambiguity in the rules themselves weighed in the operator’s favour.
The original fine
On 25 March 2025, Spelinspektionen closed a supervisory review of Roar Vegas covering responsible gambling procedures during the first quarter of 2024, from 1 January to 31 March. The authority sampled 12 customer accounts, selecting the highest-loss players across two age brackets: 18 to 24, and 25 and above.
Three accounts drew the regulator’s attention. Each carried unusually high monthly deposit limits, between SEK 100,000 and SEK 300,000, alongside behaviour the authority read as consistent with excessive gambling: rapid deposits, heavy losses and long session durations. One customer was reported to have remained logged in for extended daily periods, and several lost the bulk of their deposited funds shortly after funding their accounts.
Spelinspektionen accepted that Roar Vegas had eventually put measures in place that reduced gambling activity. It concluded, however, that the interventions came too late to satisfy the operator’s obligations, and that the delay amounted to a serious breach. A formal reprimand and the SEK 8 million administrative fine followed a proportionality assessment.
Roar Vegas contests the ruling
Roar Vegas appealed, arguing that its monitoring system paired automated alerts with manual follow-up and had operated as required. The operator said it had enforced deposit limits and account suspensions on the three customers, and had acted cautiously before escalating to harder restrictions.
The company also disputed how its behavioural signals were interpreted. Long log-in durations and rapid losses after deposits, it said, are common among sports bettors and should not be treated automatically as markers of problem gambling. Roar Vegas added that before legislative changes took effect on 1 June 2024, operators faced uncertainty over how to process personal health and financial data, which complicated responsible gambling assessments.
Central to the appeal was the claim that the regulatory framework gave no clear point at which operators must move from automated contact to direct human intervention. That gap, Roar Vegas argued, created uncertainty across the Swedish licensed market.
Court sides with operator
The court ruled that Spelinspektionen had not demonstrated an unambiguous breach. It accepted that the duty of care provision is clear enough to support intervention in cases of obvious violation, but found that Roar Vegas had not crossed that threshold.
The appeal shall therefore be granted, and the Swedish Gambling Authority’s decision shall be overturned.
The judges acknowledged that three accounts showed high deposit limits and rapid losses, and that some interventions could have been triggered sooner. Roar Vegas’s combination of automated notifications, mandatory limits and account suspensions, backed by manual follow-up, had nonetheless reduced harmful activity for the customers concerned. The court confirmed that the Gambling Act sets no specific timelines for intervention, and that the resulting ambiguity counted in the operator’s favour.
The decision removed the financial penalty in full and cleared Roar Vegas of the alleged breaches. Spelinspektionen has three weeks from the date of the judgment to appeal.
Wider regulatory stakes
The ruling carries weight beyond a single case. Swedish courts have signalled they will scrutinise the proportionality of Spelinspektionen enforcement decisions, and that regulatory ambiguity is a legitimate line of defence for licensed operators. The decision lands amid wider pressure on the Swedish market, where the online sector has been driving what little revenue growth there is and operators continue to absorb the effect of higher gaming taxes.
The unresolved question is where the line falls between sufficient automated intervention and mandatory human contact. Without prescriptive guidance, that threshold remains open to interpretation and to further legal challenge. The case also follows a pattern of contested Nordic enforcement, with regional regulators seeing penalties challenged and reduced on appeal.
Should Spelinspektionen decline to appeal, the ambiguity Roar Vegas identified will persist across the licensed market. A second challenge could instead produce the clarity that both operators and the regulator have so far lacked.
Source: Administrative Court in Linköping
