Business
Antigua & Barbuda seeking retaliatory sanctions against the United States
“We are resolved that absent a fair settlement that this is the route we will take,” Lovell said from Antigua.
Antigua & Barbuda had been promoting electronic commerce as a way to diversify its small economy and end its reliance on tourism, which was slammed by a series of hurricanes in the late 1990s. In 2000, there were numerous licensed online casinos that employed roughly 3,000 people, and the flourishing sector had an annual income of nearly US$1 billion.
Now, Lovell said the shriveled sector’s annual income is “miniscule” and there are just 400 employees. He described the impact of the U.S. ban as “devastating” for the islands’ economy, which was also rocked by the 2009 collapse of the financial empire of convicted Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford, who based his Stanford International Bank on Antigua and was once the country’s largest private employer.
“We have basically been driven over our fiscal cliff …. We feel that we really have had our backs pushed right up against the wall,” said Lovell, referring to the impact of the U.S. online betting ban.
Antigua & Barbuda in 2003 initiated WTO dispute proceedings against U.S. federal and state laws barring foreign participation in U.S. Internet gambling markets. The WTO, in rulings in 2004 and 2005, found that the U.S. had violated its 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS, which the WTO says allows Internet gambling.
The WTO has upheld rulings striking down the U.S. ban. The trade body said Washington was violating trade law by targeting online gambling without equal application of the rules to American operators offering remote betting on horse and dog racing.
But in 2006, Washington stopped U.S. banks and credit card companies from processing payments to online gambling businesses outside the country. The decision closed off the most lucrative region in a growing market worth about US$15.5 billion at the time. About half of the world’s online gamblers are based in the U.S.
