These were authorized by Santiago Creel Miranda before he left office as Secretary of State to pursue an abortive attempt to run for President at the helm of his party Partido Accion Nacional (PAN). For the leader of the organization ‘Say No to Casinos’ Daniel Olivares Villagomez, the bookmakers in Cholula is functioning illegally, owing to the fact that Creel and Televisa are infringing Mexican gaming law. The brand new sportsbook premises are located in the luxury JV towers owned by businessman Julian Ventosa and the venture has been given the name Play City. Cholula’s Play City is the first of ten bookmaking premises that Televisa, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, proposes to open by the end of the year. The other 55 will be installed gradually over the next decade, according to a report from the news agency APRO-Proceso. Daniel Olivares maintains that the federal authorities granted permission for the betting shops without their exact locations being named in the Televisa application, which is an infraction of Article 22 of the Mexican Gaming Law. In an interview given to the newspaper La Jornada de Mexico, the activist states: “The television company only submitted an address in Mexico City, although its betting houses are at national level. The government officials, Santiago Creel Miranda and Carlos Abascal Carranza, also granted the permits without having obtained approval from local municipal and state governments. This was gained much later.”

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