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Kenya to Lower Gambling Tax by 20%

After increasing the tax gambling sites were paying in Kenya to 35% in January of 2018, now in August the government has finally decided to back off and lowered the taxed rate back to 15%. SportsPesa, one of the largest sponsors of the Kenyan Premier League and Football Kenya Federation were about to see huge reduction of sponsorships as the betting sites would have been unable to profit offering bets to the market.

The betting sites were already paying a 30% corporate tax and 25% of sales went to social causes like sports sponsorship as legal requirements previously, the addition of 20% more tax was enough to have the betting sites remove their services from Kenya altogether.

This would have created a large underground market for sports betting that would go untaxed, much like the bitcoin sports betting sites available to Kenyans offer gamblers in the country. The reduction in tax revenue along with sports sponsorships would have caused some teams to be without funding previous to the MP’s changing the tax rate.

Since we have been covering how Kenyan’s buying bitcoin are going to potentially have a better store of value than the Kenyan shilling currently offers, we are also very interested if football betting in Kenya with bitcoin is going to increase or stay with M-Pesa.