Lutchmedial: Over-regulation causes underground gaming, betting activity

OPPOSITION senator Jayanti Lutchmedial says regulations governing industries such as banking and gaming must be fair across the board to prevent businesses from engaging in underground activity.

She was contributing to debate on the Gambling (Gaming and Betting) Control Bill 2021 in the Senate on Monday. The bill was passed without the support of the Opposition bench as all their senators abstained. Twenty-four government and independent senators voted for the bill.

Lutchmedial said while compliance is a “necessary burden” and the aim of such legislation is to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, over-regulation can have the opposite effect.

“For gambling to be fair, the regulations must be fair.

“What you have happening here is that you have people who have been existing for a long time with different pieces of legislation, who will now have to come into compliance.

“Take that into the context of many of these businesses having been closed for 15 to 16 months, the general state of the economy, you actually run the risk of running these businesses underground. This, again, is a known FATF (Financial Action Task Force) problem.

“It is a problem where you actually encourage illicit activity because you make your regulatory requirements to such a high standard, or the implementation and rollout of it is so high, that you actually encourage people to go underground.”

Lutchmedial said there are known examples arising out of the strict regulatory control at banks.

“We have passed many pieces of legislation to enhance the level of FATF compliance in the banking sector, as we’re required to do, but we have not (managed) the risks.

“We have embarked on large de-risking exercises and just cancelled clients and put them out of the system altogether. And what does that do? It drives what we know now as DSS (Drugs Sou Sou), generally.”

Government senator Clarence Rambharat argued that the Opposition has a track record of stalling gaming legislation.

“This goes back to 1999, when Mervyn Assam, the then minister (of trade and industry), brought a bill to deal with horseracing and off-track betting and so on, and that bill lapsed three times.

“Then this bill in 2015, laid, debated and passed in the House and came to the Senate and eventually lapsed in 2015. And the Minister of Finance revised that bill in its exact form, and it is that bill that failed at the hands of the United National Congress.”

The Opposition, Rambharat said, also has a poor history of FATF compliance, saying, “Right through until we took office in 2015, Trinidad and Tobago remained non-compliant in relation to gambling. That is the record.”

He said compliance is not about losing jobs but “preserving those jobs and setting the gaming industry into a long-term future and being able as a country to extract what we can extract from the industry. The industry is highly profitable.

“But where is the money going? Take your heads out the sand. It is exiting the country.”