By allowing Bank of The Bahamas to accept the proceeds of online gaming - especially when the other clearing banks in the jurisdiction have clearly stated that they will not accept those funds - Shadow Minister for Finance Peter Turnquest said that, in effect, the Christie administration is setting up Bank of The Bahamas to "potentially be a washing machine" or a conduit to introduce funds from online gambling into the regulated arena, which would create a series of cascading problems for The Bahamas' offshore financial center. And it is a problem the government ought to have foreseen and planned better for, he said.

FNM East Grand Bahama MP Turnquest spoke with Guardian Business about the matter yesterday.

"[The issue is that] if the other commercial clearing banks are not accepting money from the online gaming industry, once those funds get accepted into the Bank of The Bahamas, and become commingled with the other funds from other sources in the Bank of The Bahamas, it would seem there would be an issue with the Bank of The Bahamas then being able to transfer money to the other clearing banks, or for the other clearing banks to even accept checks clearing on the Bank of The Bahamas," he said. "In effect, it would be accepting gambling funds."

"The Bank of The Bahamas cannot act - in my opinion - as an intermediary for the proceeds from online gambling if it is, in fact, the stated position of these banks that they will not accept such funds," Turnquest said.

He said he did not know how the Bank of The Bahamas and the other clearing banks intend to handle the situation, but it seems a clear problem that must be dealt with.

Last week, CIBC FirstCaribbean Managing Director Bahamas Marie Rodland-Allen confirmed that neither her institution nor any of the other Canadian banks will accept web shop money; it is a matter of Canadian bank policy, Rodland-Allen said, not to accept money from online gaming.

Earlier this year, Commonwealth Bank President Ian Jennings also confirmed that his institution will not accept the web shop money, citing the issues that doing so would pose with the corresponding bank relationships between local banks and their foreign counterparts.

While the government has passed laws that will legalize and regulate web shop gaming, until the government grants licenses to the web shops, they are operating in what Tourism Minister Obie Wilchcombe has admitted is a de facto amnesty period, during which time they are not technically legal.

Meanwhile, PLP Senator Jerome Gomez has suggested the possibility of creating Bahamian banks - banks which would have no corresponding relationships with other banks in other jurisdictions - to accept the web shop deposits.

"We can create local banks that don't have any international correlations. They can take Bahamian deposits; they can give Bahamian loans; they can bank with Bahamians. They don't have to send wire transfers, trade in foreign currencies and so forth. We've got to think outside the box, and that's what we're not doing," Gomez said in a Guardian Talk Radio interview recently.

Turnquest, however, dismissed this suggestion as "showing a lack of understanding".

"It isn't just a matter of the money being able to circulate within the country," he said. "Even if that were so, they would at some point still have to transact business with these international corresponding banks in order to facilitate international commerce, because most of your supply - products in particular - is coming from overseas."

"So to the extent that the customers of these so-called internally circulating domestic banks will need at some point to transact international business, there is a problem. So I don't think that is any solution at all," Turnquest said.

Pressed for his preferred solution to the problem, the Shadow Minister told Guardian Business that the question of what the web shops are to do with their proceeds in the alternative is not a question for him.

"The Bahamian people gave a very definitive decision with respect to the web shops and how they should be handled, and the government decided that they were going to proceed anyway. In the face of that, they ought to have had the solution for the questions that naturally follow, one of which is what you now do with these proceeds," he said.

"I believe that they attempted to address the situation with the (2014 Gaming Act and Regulations) - which do contain some very good compliance requirements. However, that really doesn't mean much if, in fact, the major banks are still not going to accept the source," Turnquest continued.

"So the question has to be put to the government: What is their intention? Because I would assume that having decided that they are going to go against the Bahamian people, they must have thought through the whole entire process after their consultation with the FATF (Financial Action Task Force) - which we have never gotten a public report on, by the way," he said.

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