Italy's newly seated Deputy Prime Minister has set his sights to have all gambling machines replaced by pinball tables all over the country starting January 1, 2019.
Last week, Italy's Customs and Monopoly Agency (AAMS) got a new boss, right after the new coalition government appointed former tax official Benedetto Mineo to manage the agency. Luigi Di Maio, Deputy Prime Minister, publicly expressed the change as clearing out the government of its connections to the Democratic Party, in which the coalition triumphed over at the polls last June.
The change was angrily called out by the outgoing AAMS boss Giovanni Kessler, a Democratic Party member, who consequently posted in his personal Facebook account marking Mineo's appointment as "a political cleansing ... that undermines impartiality and good performance of the technical organs of the public administration."
Now, Luigi Di Maio's anti-gambling movement has now set its sights to the retail scene using a would-be meme that calls for pinball machines to replace the hundreds of thousands of various gambling machines (AWPs, VLTs, sports betting terminals, etc.) present in Italy's clubs and bars. Di Maio put a slogan on his new campaign and insisted that "pinball has never ruined anyone."
Source:
https://www.intergameonline.com/coin-op/news/italy-pinball-to-replace-slots-in-bars
