Ligi, who deliberately distanced himself from the bill of amendments to the Gambling Tax Act, pinned this particular mistake on legislators. 

"This doesn't have the finance minister's signature on it; the finance minister opposed submitting it for as long as he could, and this isn't a government[-initiated] bill," Ligi said Tuesday, noting he had only proposed a few technical changes to it.

"I accept political compromises as such, but this is the most unpleasant compromise I've encountered during this Riigikogu term, and easily the worst one of this government's term," he noted regarding the process.

"I even refused to say the government supported it, even though it was in the coalition agreement," he continued, adding that the bill didn't go through the usual approval rounds either, making these kinds of mistakes more likely. "If there was one, it certainly wasn't made by the finance minister."

He stressed that the mistake in question wasn't just on coalition MPs' shoulders but on the entire Riigikogu Finance Committee. "This is a Riigikogu bill," he emphasized.

In terms of the amended Gambling Tax Act, the most important goal is mitigating money-laundering risks, he said, warning against this approach to funding culture in Estonia.

"Someone's gonna discover based on a 1990s-era mindset that the money is going to start flowing and there will be a big international race for gamblers," Ligi said. "That's not what culture should want either. It's gonna be temporary, it'll be easy money, and it can disappear just as easily — if it comes at all. And by our estimates, it won't."

Ligi: Cutting gambling tax will reduce revenue

Finance Ministry forecasts, he noted, show that cutting Estonia's gambling tax will actually reduce tax revenue, especially paired with tightening oversight.

"And if it doesn't, that means oversight has failed, which is also likely because oversight is already constantly under attack," Ligi said. "Every lawsuit brought by market participants, where they find some loophole, is effectively directed against oversight and the public interest."

Anti-money laundering oversight operates under different logic, he continued, where it's all risk-based investigations as there's usually no direct evidence of where money has come from.

"If that gets thrown overboard again, then we're back in the early 2010s, when the origin of every euro had to be proven through investigations and court," he added.

Eesti 200 MP Tanel Tein, a leading lawmaker on the amendments passed last month and a member of the Riigikogu's Finance Committee, blames Finance Ministry officials for the wording error in the legislation that allowed Estonia's online casinos to go tax-free in 2026.

"This wasn't a political decision or a substantive change in tax policy, but rather a wording error that arose in the multistage legislative process," Tein said in a written statement.

MP: This was never the intent

The original aim was to gradually lower the gambling tax on remote games from 6 to 4 percent, applying to both games of chance and skill.

According to Tein, a ministry comment last September added the term "skill games" unnecessarily, narrowing the legislation's scope.

While a November correction removed the wording, the second-reading version reintroduced it, which the Riigikogu later approved.

"That's how the law as it stands for 2026 ended up mistakenly framing the tax obligation as applying only to skill games, even though the legislature's intent, earlier draft versions and the logic of the entire process clearly pointed to remote gambling as a whole," the MP said.

At no point, he emphasized, was there any intent to end the taxing of online casinos. On the contrary, he said, the same tax law clearly states that gambling taxes are collected on wagers across all types of gambling.

The tax mishap comes as online gambling revenue was expected to support the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, though Finance Minister Jürgen Ligi said he cannot provide financial help.

Riigikogu Finance Committee chair and MP Annely Akkermann (Reform) promised to correct the error within a month.

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