hvorfor ligger studioene i latvia og malta

Right, and it's not a tax dodge aimed at Norway specifically. It's about finding the cheapest sheltered harbour within the EU that still has a credible licence. Malta is the shelf front and the licence, Latvia is the factory floor, most live studios I've dealt with hold MGA licences but run the actual floors in Riga or Vilnius.

To add a concrete figure: a Latvian dealer earns roughly 1,200, 1,600 euros a month, so a single live roulette table costs the operator about a tenth of what the same table would cost in Oslo. That wage spread, more than any tax scheme, decides where the studios physically sit.

Latvia is not a high-risk or unsafe place to register a business, it's a normal EU member state with a functioning legal system. I did accounting consultancy for a smaller operator that moved compliance from Cyprus to Riga in 2021, and they had zero trouble with authorities; they chose Latvia for the Russian- and German-speaking staff, not the tax rate.

So the 'Malta' stamp in the footer is often just a postal address; the actual recording floors, dealers, and IT are where the cheap labour is. The Maltese licence application took a client nine months and cost around 100k euros; the Latvian premises cost less than a tenth of a comparable Stockholm studio.

That also explains why you see the same pattern across the industry: the legal entity is where the licence is respected, the operations are where the salary costs make the math work. It's not about avoiding Norwegian regulators directly, just about being cheaper than any Nordic alternative while still looking legit on paper.