The Bahamas’ Gaming Act, which went into effect last week, requires that “web shops” without licenses will be forced to close their operations.
This may force a good percentage of the 200 or so “shops” that are operating on the island to stop operating since licensing fees are about $32,000 per webshop.
The owner of the country’s oldest such operation, Craig Flowers of FML, says his company actually plans to expand and hire people.
Island Luck, by contrast, the largest web shop operator on the island, acknowledged that it has laid off nearly 50 workers as a result of the Gaming Act. Flowers said he would probably hire those people.
Some legal experts on the island speculate that the cost of licensing and paying back taxes could result in most of the 200 web shops, now in existence going out of business. About 30 companies own those 200 shops.
“We are probably the only ones who will be expanding and not be retracting,” Flowers told the Tribune. “We operate in a different category than the other web shops. The industry is related to online gaming and the other sector is ticketing. We’ve never went into the streets and dealt with ticketing because it was an exposure to elements we didn’t want to be involved in. It is something that we will be looking at now.”
Bahamas Tourism Minister Obie Wilchcombe recently gave the unlicensed web shops a week to come into compliance or be shut down.
