Council of State upholds ADM’s revised bingo concession fees in Italy

Italy's Council of State rejected a compliance appeal brought by a bingo concessionaire against the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (ADM), according to the court's judgment. The Sixth Section found that the agency's revised system for calculating the fees owed by halls operating under technical extension conformed to its earlier ruling. The judgment, number 7525/2026, was published on 14 October.

The mechanism, introduced by ADM with a determination of 31 July 2026, is divided into 81 turnover bands and links the amounts due to the revenue of each concession. It replaced a transitional regime under which a flat monthly fee of €2,800 applied to all halls. The new system sets progressive amounts with a minimum and a maximum threshold and covers the period from 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2026.

The dispute concerns bingo concessions that expired and were extended by law under a uniform monthly fee that did not depend on the economic results of individual halls. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on the matter on 20 March 2025 in joined cases C-728/22, C-729/22 and C-730/22, criticising the national rules that allowed unilateral extension of concessions with an increased flat fee identical for all operators, kept a ban on transferring premises and required operators to accept extensions to take part in future allocation procedures. On that basis the Council of State, in judgment 7784/2025, required ADM to disapply the rules incompatible with EU law and to redetermine the economic conditions of the concession relationships, taking account of operators' actual revenue and of the advantages and disadvantages of continuing activity under extension.

The appellant argued that ADM had not executed that judgment, saying the agency had continued to apply the flat monthly fee through two determinations adopted in December 2025 and February 2026. It asked the Council of State to annul those measures, order the immediate launch of tenders to reassign the concessions and require a new determination of the amounts due, possibly through the appointment of a commissioner. It also challenged the 31 July 2026 system, arguing that the banding still produced flat effects because operators with different collection volumes in the same band would pay the same fee, and that the system favoured halls with higher volumes. It cited a hall whose collection rose from €17.1m to €25m while its annual fee remained €108,000, an increase of €7.9m.

The court said challenges to the reasonableness and adequacy of the bands concern the legality of the new administrative choices and must be brought through ordinary appeal proceedings, since a compliance judgment verifies respect for obligations arising from an earlier ruling and does not allow the judge to substitute for the administration's discretionary assessments. On application, the Council of State noted that ADM had begun reconstructing the positions of individual concessions, examining annual turnover and payments made during the nine years of extension, and had sent an individual measure on 18 September 2026 recognising sums paid and fees redetermined under the new system. For the judges, these activities showed that the administration had complied with the earlier ruling, excluding the alleged inaction.

On the failure to launch new tenders, the Council of State said judgment 7784/2025 had recognised the need to reassign the concessions but had not set a specific deadline for starting the selection procedures. Preparing the tenders requires prior definition of the concession model, the territorial distribution of gaming points, the duration of the new relationships and their economic conditions, choices that may require action by the government and legislature, and their non-adoption cannot be attributed to ADM as a breach of the judgment, the court said. The Sixth Section rejected the compliance appeal in full and ordered the costs of the proceedings to be offset.