Romania's ONJN starts review of national gambling legislation under new president Tomescu

Romania's gambling authority, the ONJN, has begun a review of the country's gambling legislation. In an official statement, the regulator said many rules are outdated and have left the sector with fragmentation and inconsistencies. It did not specify which changes it intends to make.

According to the ONJN, the review was ordered by its president, Valentin-Ioan Tomescu, who took office on 21 August 2026. He altered the makeup of the working group that drafts regulatory acts for the sector. The group's mandate is to analyze and harmonize the existing legislation. The stated aim is a revised legal framework that better reflects the current state of the local industry and the regulator's supervisory and control duties, in the authority's words "bringing order to the entire regulatory framework". No deadline has been set.

The announcement comes as the ONJN works through a period of turbulence. Tomescu replaced Vlad-Cristian Soare, who had led the regulator for just over a year after being appointed in April 2025. Soare has said he was given no explanation for his replacement, which was ordered by Romania's President.

The regulator has also been hit by corruption allegations. In July, reports emerged that Ana-Maria Badea, the ONJN's former Deputy Director General, had become a person of interest in a probe into alleged bribes paid to ONJN officials to favour certain operators. The same month, Odea Nestor, who served as ONJN president from 2013 to 2017, was taken into custody over an alleged €100,000 bribe linked to an ONJN official and a Bulgarian gambling operator. Soare has distanced himself from both cases and stressed that the institution must operate with zero tolerance toward corruption.

Soare himself had been brought in after an audit found that nearly €1bn in gambling taxes was missing for 2019 to 2023, a finding that led to the resignation of his predecessor. Against this background, the legislative review is Tomescu's first major signal of the direction he intends to give the regulator.