French legal quarters have reacted with a mixture of anger and exasperation to a recent Maltese Court of Appeal sentence, which refused to accept a sentence by a French court of appeal that would have banned a French on-line bookmaker from proposing horse races in France.

The legal website www.droit-technologie.org said the Maltese sentence “surprised everyone by the audacity of its reasoning”.

“It now remains to be seen if other jurisdictions will follow the example of the Maltese court,” it added, “especially the UK, the other big on-line betting country. Malta and the UK are both common law jurisdictions, with common juridical traditions.”

The bookmaker in question is Zerturf , which has broken into ground reserved for the French national betting system, PMU. The Malta-based company was condemned by a French court in July 2005 and the judgement was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in January last year. But when the Maltese court was asked to implement the French ruling, the Maltese court found in favour of Zerturf and said the French ruling could not be executed in Malta.

For basically the same reason, that of having the name of an on-line foreign-based company, Unibet Cycling, the Swedish team was forced to remove the name of its sponsor from its cyclists participating in the opening race of the season.

In reaction, the cyclists sported a question mark instead of the logo of their sponsor, and the company published an advert in all the principal French newspapers.