Rome court orders gaming concessionaire to repay €74,840 to AWP operator

The Rome Tribunal's Seventeenth Civil Section has ordered a gaming concessionaire to repay an AWP machine operator in liquidation €74,840.37, according to a judgment deposited on 26 October 2026. The court found the sum had been unduly collected as the operator's share of the extraordinary levy introduced by the 2015 Stability Law, with legal interest running from the deposit of the judgment until payment.

The dispute arose from a contract for the collection of gaming through AWP machines under article 110, paragraph 6, letter a), of the T.U.L.P.S., in force between the parties. By a note of 9 February 2015 the concessionaire set the operator's share of the levy at €1,177.27 for each of the 95 machines concerned, a total of €111,840.65, which was paid in full. In March 2016 the same concessionaire notified a recalculation to €1,965.06 per machine, equal to €186,681.07, without ever clarifying the criteria used, including during the proceedings.

The operator, represented by lawyers Vincenzo Sapone and Micaela Malinverno, paid the difference with an express reservation of the right to recover it, solely in order to obtain authorisation to transfer the contract.

Sapone said the Tribunal clarified that article 1, paragraphs 920 and 921, of Law 208/2015, in giving an authentic interpretation of the levy, did not alter the criterion for determining the charge on concessionaires, which remains proportional to the number of machines referable to 31 December 2014 under the 15 January 2015 directoral decree of the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli. The provision addressed only the internal allocation among operators in the chain, he said, which is entrusted to the legal criterion of proportionality to each party's participation in the distribution of the compensation under the contractual agreements, with no further renegotiation required.

According to the judgment, the later recalculation therefore has no basis in the supervening rule, which introduced no greater charge than the concessionaire had already quantified in February 2015. Nor could the higher amount be justified by the late payment of one of the 10 instalments: the levy rules provide for no change to the allocation criteria in the event of delay, which entails only the loss of the €77.27 per machine reduction offered for punctual payment. The excess paid is therefore an undue payment recoverable under article 2033 of the Civil Code.

The ruling states that a concessionaire cannot change after the event the allocation criterion originally applied, nor convert a delay in paying an instalment into a greater charge on the operator, and that sums paid in excess as the 2015 levy are recoverable. According to the report, it ends the application of the so-called recalculation mechanism applied by the concessionaire.