BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission dealt a blow to European online gaming companies on Monday when Brussels accepted a U.S. offer of openings in other sectors as compensation for closing its gambling market to foreign firms.
European companies such as PartyGaming and bwin Interactive Entertainment had hoped the European Union executive might shun a settlement and fight on instead to restore their ability to operate in the worlds biggest market.
Shares in PartyGaming were down 4.1 percent at 29 pence at 0517 EST and bwin stock was down 2.1 percent at 26.09 euros.
"A bilateral agreement was signed in Geneva, which provides EU service suppliers with new trade opportunities in the U.S. postal and courier, research and development, storage and warehouse sectors," the Commission said in a statement.
"The U.S. also made concessions in the testing and analysis services sector."
The Commission said it would still press the United States for "a non-discriminatory policy towards Internet gambling."
The case dates to April 2005 when the World Trade Organisation ruled that a U.S. law allowing only domestic companies to provide online horse-race gambling services discriminated against foreign companies.
Last year, the U.S. Congress tightened restrictions on Internet gambling by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.
And in May, Washington announced it was retroactively excluding gambling services from market-opening commitments it made as part of a 1994 world trade deal, kicking off compensation talks with the EU and other countries including Japan and India.
A spokesman for Austrias bwin said the company had not expected the EU-U.S. talks to yield more at this point but was confident the EU Commission would continue to push for a regulated opening of the U.S. Internet gambling market.
"We continue to believe that it is better to regulate than to prohibit, because the reality shows that the prohibition only drives out the transparent, listed operators," he said. "We trust the Commission will continue to push further for this."
"It certainly is going to be a long way still," he added.
Bwin shut down its U.S. poker site and wrote off 500 million euros (717 million) of investments last year after the United States effectively outlawed Internet gambling.
A spokesman for Dutch mail and express carrier TNT said of the deal: "We are in favor of liberalization of these kind of services. We would investigate what that means, the rest would depend very much on the level of opening."
(Reporting by William Schomberg; additional reporting by Boris Groendahl and Foo Yunchee; editing by Dale Hudson/Elizabeth Fullerton)
