Malta enacted Article 56A of its Gaming Act, universally known as Bill 55, in June 2023 with one purpose: to prevent its courts from recognising or enforcing foreign judgments against Malta-licensed gambling operators. Simple enough in concept. The difficulty, as the Court of Justice confirmed this week, is that the law has made the enforcement problem considerably worse for the operators it was designed to protect.
The CJEU delivered its judgment in C-198/24, TQ v Mr Green Limited, on 21 May 2026. The ruling is not the thunderbolt some claimants’ lawyers had hoped for. But it is significant, and the story of how we arrived here is worth understanding.
Bill 55 was Malta’s response to an avalanche of restitution claims brought against its licensed online operators, primarily in Germany and Austria, by players who had gambled on sites that held no local licence. Under both German and Austrian law, gambling contracts with unlicensed operators were void, which meant the operators were required to refund every euro they had taken. The sums involved are large; mass litigation funding groups have been acquiring these claims in industrial quantities.
Malta’s position was that its operators were lawfully licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority, and that foreign courts had no business second-guessing that. Article 56A put that position into statute: any foreign judgment arising from “illegal” claims against MGA-licensed operators would simply not be recognised in Malta. The theory was that if enforcement in Malta was blocked, operators could shelter assets there and wait out the litigation. A straightforward, if legally audacious, piece of defensive legislation.
The European Commission disagrees, having opened infringement proceedings against Malta in June 2025 on the basis that Article 56A breaches the Brussels I bis Regulation. An Advocate General opined in April this year that it is manifestly incompatible. Judgment on that specific question is still pending.
The Mr Green Case
The facts of the Mr Green case are representative of hundreds of similar disputes. An Austrian player, identified only as TQ, lost €62,878 gambling on Mr Green’s platform between January 2017 and April 2019. Mr Green held a Maltese licence; it did not hold an Austrian one. Austrian courts found the contracts void and ordered full restitution. The judgments became final and enforceable in April 2022. Mr Green did not pay.
In February 2024, TQ applied for a European Account Preservation Order, an EU mechanism that allows a creditor holding an existing judgment to freeze a debtor’s bank accounts across multiple Member States simultaneously, without giving the debtor advance notice. TQ sought to freeze Mr Green’s accounts in Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta and Sweden.
The EAPO application was dismissed at first instance, partly on the basis that TQ’s main piece of evidence was too old. That evidence concerned Dimoco Europe GmbH, an Austrian payment service provider that had held credit balances on Mr Green’s behalf and settled claims from third-party debtors. In early 2021, and not coincidentally around the time Austrian courts were beginning to issue restitution orders against Mr Green in similar cases, the company terminated its contract with Dimoco. The Austrian credit balance disappeared.
The district court said this was ancient history; three years had passed. The referring court was not so sure, and asked the CJEU whether past debtor conduct and foreign legislative obstacles could count towards the “real risk” of dissipation required to obtain an EAPO.
The Court confirmed that both can be relevant, but with important caveats. On past conduct: there is no rule that debtor actions lose their evidential value after a fixed period. What matters is whether the risk they demonstrate persists at the time the EAPO application is made. The Court added a commercially pointed observation: for online operators with limited physical assets outside their home jurisdiction, a credit balance with a payment provider may be one of the few assets a creditor could actually reach. Terminating that relationship, in the context of mounting litigation, can be treated as evidence of a deliberate strategy to frustrate enforcement.
On Article 56A: the Court declined to treat the law’s mere existence as sufficient to establish a “real risk.” The EAPO test is about the debtor’s intent to evade payment; it is not a catch-all remedy for legal obstacles. Pointing to Bill 55 alone will not get a claimant an EAPO. However, the Court said Article 56A can be taken into account as contextual evidence when assessing the overall picture of debtor conduct. The law does not help operators; it simply does not help claimants quite as much as they might have wished.
What This Means in Practice
The practical upshot is this: operators that have taken any steps resembling asset management in response to enforcement pressure — terminating payment relationships, consolidating treasury balances, reorganising group structures — now face meaningful EAPO exposure across multiple Member States simultaneously. The Dimoco termination was from 2021. The CJEU has confirmed it remained relevant in 2024.
“Article 56A, far from neutralising enforcement risk, now features in the legal landscape as a factor that can be used against the operators it was designed to shelter.”
The judgment also confirms something strategically uncomfortable for Malta: Article 56A, far from neutralising enforcement risk, now features in the legal landscape as a factor that can be used against the operators it was designed to shelter. Whether that was an intended consequence of the drafting, I rather doubt.
The walls are closing in on Bill 55. This week, faster than most.