A deep throat at the National Lotteries Authority (NLA) has revealed to Adom News that in a few days the Authority would secure a fiat from the Attorney-General to enable it carry out criminal prosecution against any entity, particularly telecom operators that violated the National Lotto Act. The NLA had, over the years, been battling the Ghana Gaming Commission (GGC) and telecom operators in particular over some marketing promotions organized by the telcos with the permission of the GGC. The NLA had always maintained that those marketing promotions were actually lotteries in disguise, and Section 4 (1 and 2) of the National Lotto Act, Act 722, 2008 prohibited all other persons and organizations from operating lottery apart from the NLA. On the basis of that legal provision, the NLA had, on several occasions, hauled almost all the GSM network operators, other corporate bodies, and the GGC to court. But in one of those recent cases between the NLA and Tigo, the courts ruled that a breach of the Lotto Act, if so, was a criminal offence, which could only be prosecuted by the Attorney-General, and not the NLA. The highly placed source at the NLA told Adom News that following the ruling, the Authority begun the process to get the A-G's blessing, adding that within a matter of days it would obtain a fiat from the A-G authorizing it to institute criminal proceedings against any entity that violated the Lotto Act. Meanwhile the Commercial Court would this week give ruling in a case involving the NLA vs MTN and GGC, and that may have implications for the several other similar cases in court. The NLA is also at the Supreme Court seeking an interpretation of some provisions of the Gaming Act, Act 721, 2008, and questioning the authority of the Commission to charge permit fees, and issue permits for marketing promotions that the NLA insisted were lotteries in disguise. The NLA is also seeking to stop MTN from carrying on with its premium SMS rate ‘Dream Big’ promotion; but MTN, in an unprecedented move, took NLA to court to question its authority to prevent the promotion. Both the MTN vs NLA case in the High Court; and the NLA vs MTN/GGC in the Supreme Court are still pending. Meanwhile the Gaming Commission had always argued that the type of marketing promotions for which it had ever granted permits to telcos and or other entities, were games of chance, as defined by the Gaming Act. Section 72 of the Gaming Act defined a ‘game of chance’ to have three main features – customers paying a premium rate for a chance to win, a draw, and winning to be only by chance; as opposed to Section 56 of the National Lotto Act, which defined lotto to specifically include drawing of tickets bearing numbers, which is not the case in the marketing promotions of the telcos.