Grosvenor owner Rank pays £5m penalty for casino failures

Rank Group is to pay a £5m penalty after regulators identified a series of compliance issues within three of its casino operators, including duty of care to customers.

The Gambling Commission said its investigation had revealed anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures at Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited.

The companies have 51 casinos across Britain collectively.

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The watchdog said the failures between 2024 and 2025 included allowing inconsistent decisions to be applied to customers with elevated money laundering risk and poor procedures and controls.

It found examples of "inappropriate risk levels being ascribed to high-risk customers and high-risk sources of funds being used by customers without appropriate scrutiny".

It stated a record was seen of a customer exclusively playing with cash, recycling about £85,000 through the venue over approximately 11 weeks.

It further identified a failure to carry out safer gambling checks on a person during a period in which they lost £50,000.

In another instance, there was no record kept of any safer gambling interactions with a customer who won approximately £260,000 in a short period and then lost around £250,000 in 12 days.

The commission said the operators would be subject to third-party checks in future and the settlement agreed with Rank would go to the government.

Its executive director of operations, Sue Young, said: "Larger enforcement cases are often associated with online gambling but, as today's announcement shows, the risks of anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures are equally alive in the land-based sector.

"We would advise all premises-based operators to take a careful look at this case and ensure their own business is not making the same mistakes, and therefore they do not face costly and inevitable commission action."

Rank, which also includes Mecca bingo and gaming centres within its stable of entertainment brands, had previously flagged the investigation into the casinos.

It made a £5m provision for the penalty in its 2025/26 accounts.

The company told investors on Wednesday that remedial actions, demanded by the commission, had been "substantially completed".

The company has form for failures to protect problem gamblers.

It was fined £500,000 in both 2018 and in 2023 for similar compliance issues while the company was handed a £5.8m penalty in 2021 for breaches of money laundering and social responsibility regulations relating to an online platform.

The company's shares - down more than 25% in the year to date - were trading 1% lower on Wednesday.

(c) Sky News 2026: Grosvenor owner Rank pays £5m penalty for casino failures