The pres­i­dent of the On­line Gam­ing Agents As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (OGAATT), Dean Per­sad, is rais­ing se­ri­ous con­cerns over what he de­scribes as years of fi­nan­cial mis­man­age­ment with­in the coun­try’s on­line gam­ing sec­tor.

He has ac­cused the for­mer board of the Na­tion­al Lot­ter­ies Con­trol Board (NL­CB) of un­fair­ly pe­nal­is­ing agents and ar­bi­trar­i­ly shut­ting down gam­ing ter­mi­nals, a move he said is cost­ing the State ap­prox­i­mate­ly $900,000 in lost rev­enue every week.

Now, the as­so­ci­a­tion is seek­ing the at­ten­tion of the new­ly ap­point­ed board.

“We’ve been plead­ing for years. In­stead of lis­ten­ing, they pun­ished agents who were try­ing to be com­pli­ant. It was pure wicked­ness,” Per­sad told Guardian Me­dia.

He said 36 gam­ing ma­chines re­main in­ac­tive, some for close to a year, and each ma­chine typ­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates $25,000 week­ly for the NL­CB af­ter com­mis­sions and costs are re­moved.

“When you sup­press 36 ma­chines, you’re los­ing $25,000 per week, per ma­chine. That’s $900,000 week­ly. In one month, you make back the $2 mil­lion they claim agents owe. That don’t make sense at all.”

Per­sad in­sist­ed most agents are not delin­quent but are vic­tims of ma­chine er­rors, theft, and sys­tem fail­ures be­yond their con­trol.

“Some of these agents were robbed. Some had mal­func­tion­ing ma­chines giv­ing the wrong fig­ures. And they knew the ma­chines were bad. They held meet­ings and couldn’t solve the prob­lems—but still pun­ished us.”

He point­ed to out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy be­ing used by the NL­CB.

“These ma­chines are over two decades old. They were built for eight func­tions and are now forced to do 50. The sys­tem was bound to fail.”

He al­so re­vealed that NL­CB has re­cent­ly be­gun re­plac­ing these mal­func­tion­ing ter­mi­nals, an ad­mis­sion, he said, that the prob­lems were long known but ig­nored.

“Now they’re chang­ing ter­mi­nals, be­cause they knew about the mal­func­tion­ing of the pre­vi­ous ones. They hur­ried­ly start­ed do­ing this be­fore the ap­point­ment of the new board, just to make them­selves look good,” Per­sad said.

The out­go­ing NL­CB board, he said, not on­ly ig­nored agents’ con­cerns but es­ca­lat­ed pres­sure by rais­ing fees and set­ting ar­bi­trary sales lim­its.

Per­sad al­so blast­ed the NL­CB’s han­dling of night de­posits, al­leg­ing that de­layed bank pro­cess­ing—and in some cas­es, lost de­posits—led to wrong­ful sup­pres­sion of agents’ ter­mi­nals.

New­ly ap­point­ed NL­CB Chair­man Ken Em­rith, when con­tact­ed by Guardian Me­dia, con­firmed that he is ex­pect­ed to meet with all stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing the On­line Gam­ing Agents As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go , in the com­ing weeks.