A FRENCH magistrate was preparing last night to lay charges against the joint chief executives of BWin, the Austrian bookmaker, for allegedly breaching French gambling laws.

The move came as the European Commission threatened to broaden an inquiry into national gambling monopolies.

Manfred Bodner and Norbert Teufelberger were questioned by a judge in Nanterre, near Paris, after spending the weekend in a French prison. They were arrested on Friday. Their lawyer expected them to be put under formal investigation for “illicit gambling”.

The legal action in France comes after the revocation of BWin’s betting licence in Germany and the arrest in the United States of two British online gambling executives — Peter Dicks, the Sportingbet chairman, and David Carruthers, the chief executive of BetOnSports.

The European Commission said yesterday that it was ready to widen its inquiry into whether national betting monopolies contravene European Union competition law to the new member states. The Commission is scrutinising monopolies in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Charlie McCreevy, the Internal Market Commissioner, said that he wanted to check that national laws were “necessary, adequate and not discriminatory”. He was “in no way seeking to liberalise the market”.

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