The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

It is very interesting that few, if any, of those persons who complain about the depressed state of the Bahamas economy, consider the impact that the web shops have, and continue to have, in this regard.

A friend of mine recently raised this issue, and by supposition, calculated that if the net profit to the web shop owners is collectively one hundred million per annum, then that money is effectively dead to the economy. There is just so much that these web shop owners can consume. After all, they have been an untaxed industry for many, many, years now, and even at current levels of taxes and fees, the take home must be ginormous.

But back to the theoretical 100 million. If an average import duty plus vat, is around fifty per cent, then the government is losing 50 million in revenue that would otherwise have been spent on imported goods by the hapless fools that gamble.

I don’t know if the government feels that the web shops pay this much in fees and licenses, but it is certainly worth some consideration.

As an industry that is still unregulated, we may not know what percentage of bets remain with the web-shop, nor even what the gross bets is. I would be extremely surprised if the web shops are now depositing all proceeds with banks that will take it, so there is likely very little official knowledge of what the number is. Maybe it’s 500 million or even more.

So maybe this is a contributing factor to Sir Franky’s complaint about lack of real estate investment, as well as the car dealers woes. No doubt we will shortly have the Super Value prognosis as well.

But Pandora is now out of the box, and just like the Colgate toothpaste, once it’s out of the tube you can never get it back in.

MONKEEDOO

Nassau,

February 25, 2016.