Dominica Gaming Licence 2026: The IBC Act Behind Every Quote Was Repealed in 2022

The IBC route ended on 1 January 2022

Search for a Dominica gaming licence and the answer comes back in one shape. Register an International Business Company, file a five-year business plan, pay a fee, sign an agreement with the Ministry of Finance, serve no one on the island. Google’s AI Overview on 24 October 2026 put it the same way and named the International Business Companies Act of 1996 as the legal basis.

That Act is gone. We read the three instruments that bracket it on the Government of Dominica’s laws site.

Date	Instrument	What it does
16 Dec 1996	SRO 65 of 1996	Brings the IBC Act, Act No. 10 of 1996, into operation
24 Jan 2019	Act No. 2 of 2019 (gazetted)	Rewrites s. 109: the tax exemption now covers only IBCs incorporated on or before 31 December 2018 and stops on 31 December 2021 or earlier winding-up
19 Feb 2020	Act No. 2 of 2020 (assent)	Takes out of the exemption intellectual property assets acquired or created before 31 December 2018, and income from those assets and from specific assets or projects acquired or started before that date
7 Jul 2021	Act No. 6 of 2021 (gazetted; assent 5 July)	Repeals the IBC Act, Cap. 78:01 (s. 3)
1 Jan 2022	Act No. 6 of 2021, s. 1(2)	The repeal takes effect

The regime lasted 25 years. Parliament gave 178 days’ notice between the gazette and the repeal date, and the repeal has now been in force for 1,757 days, or 4.8 years.

The repeal Act also tells existing IBCs where to go. Section 5 lets a company that carried on business under the old Act apply to register under the Companies Act without paying any fee, keep its name and receive a new certificate of incorporation. Registered agents had 21 days to tell their clients and must keep the old records for five years after the repeal. Obligations and penalties incurred while the Act was in force survive (s. 4).

One drafting detail matters to anyone who missed the switch. The published text of s. 5(1) gives the migration window as running to “the 31st day of December” and leaves the year blank. We could not find a correction in the laws database, so whether a late re-registration is still accepted is a question for the Registrar.

The tax exemption ended a day earlier

Vendor pages still list “immunity from income tax, withholding tax and sales tax” as a reason to choose Dominica. That came from s. 109 of the 1996 Act, which exempted an IBC from “taxes, duties and similar charges” for twenty years from incorporation and kept it outside exchange control.

Act No. 2 of 2019 cut that down. Companies incorporated after 31 December 2018 got no exemption, and companies formed before then lost it on 31 December 2021. A company formed on the last eligible day, 31 December 2018, had been promised cover to the end of 2038; it lost 17 years of it. The 2020 amendment then took intellectual property and income from specific pre-2019 assets and projects out of what remained. By the time the repeal took effect the next morning, no IBC in Dominica was tax-exempt under this Act.

We did not check what tax a company re-registered under the Companies Act pays today. That depends on the Income Tax Act and on where the business is actually carried on, and neither is covered here.

What the statute book says about gaming

We read the IBC Act in full, all 92 pages of the scanned 1996 text. It does not contain the words gaming, gambling, betting, lottery or casino. Its section 5 defines an IBC as a company that does not trade with people resident in Dominica, hold land in Dominica other than office premises, take bank deposits or write insurance. That residents clause is the source of the “strictly offshore” condition vendors describe. The licence itself was never in the Act.

On 24 October 2026 the government’s laws search (Revised Laws 1990 and later Acts) returned no title containing gaming, gambling, betting, casino, online or chance. Two statutes do deal with gambling:

• Lotteries Act, Cap. 20:12 (Act No. 9 of 1976, amended 1990). It sets up a Lotteries Commission that is “the sole authority for the running or operation of lotteries in Dominica” (s. 3(3)), though the Minister may licence another body to run a lottery (s. 3(4)). The Commission may run approved forms of pool betting and may advise the Minister “on the development of all forms of games of chance in the State” (s. 17(3)(b), (e)). It is a state-lottery statute; it does not license private online operators.
• Small Charges Act, Cap. 10:39, s. 27. Keeping a house or place for gambling, or holding a lottery, carries a fine of 3,000 dollars; receiving people in a house for gaming, or gaming in a public place, carries three months’ imprisonment. Gaming, lotteries, sweepstakes and raffles organised by a person who has first obtained a written permit from the Minister or the Financial Secretary are exempt (s. 27(6)); part of that subsection, including any condition on who may hold a permit or for what purpose, is illegible in the government’s scan. The permit may set the fees payable to general revenue, the accounts to be kept and the security to be given. Breaching a permit condition carries 4,000 dollars or three months (s. 27(7)). The section is written for houses and public places.

A Minister’s permit under s. 27(6) is the only statutory mechanism we found that matches the vendors’ description of an agreement with fees set case by case. No vendor names it, and we found no published permit for online gaming.

What the regulator publishes

The Financial Services Unit, a department of the Ministry of Finance, says on its homepage that it regulates “Gaming Companies” alongside offshore banks, insurers and money service businesses. The rest of its site is quieter.

FSU page (24 Oct 2026)	Gaming content
Homepage	Lists gaming companies among regulated entities
Legislation (27 downloads)	No gaming statute. Still lists the IBC Act 1996 without noting the repeal
Fees	Credit unions, insurers, money services, offshore banking, virtual assets. No gaming line
Registered entities search	55 entities: 22 offshore banks, 10 general insurers, 9 money services, 6 credit unions, 3 composite and 3 life insurers, 1 development bank, 1 underwriter. No gaming company

The register page states that entities not listed “are not authorised to do business in the Commonwealth of Dominica”. We counted it through the site’s own search on 24 October 2026; the figure is a snapshot.

What vendor pages quote

The figures in circulation do not agree with each other, which is the clearest sign they do not come from one published schedule.

Source	Term	Fees claimed	Other claims
iGamingToday, 20 Sep 2024	Five years	A USD 15,000 “one-time fee”, and 5% of gross revenue or USD 50,000, whichever is larger	USD 500,000 capital; IBC registration
GamblingMaps, updated 18 Jun 2026	One year, renewable	USD 15,000 application; annual USD 75,000 or 5% of gross revenue, whichever is greater	Issued by the FSU to IBCs; framework “1996”
Google AI Overview, 24 Oct 2026	One year	USD 15,000 to the Accountant General	USD 500,000 paid-up capital or letter of credit; one to two months

Taken at face value, the two annual floors are 50% apart. Under the USD 50,000 version the 5% rate only bites above USD 1 million of gross revenue; under the USD 75,000 version, above USD 1.5 million. At USD 500,000 of revenue the floor works out at 10% or 15% of revenue depending on which page you read. None of the three mentions the 2021 repeal or the end of the tax exemption.

We are not saying no agreement was ever signed on these terms; they may have been negotiated one by one and never published. The narrower point: in 2026 a buyer cannot check any of these numbers against a law, a regulation, a fee notice or a register.

Before paying for a Dominica licence

1. Ask for the legal basis in writing. Which Act and section authorises the licence, and who signs it? If the answer is the IBC Act, it has not existed since 1 January 2022.
2. Ask the FSU directly whether it accepts gaming applications and why its register lists no gaming company. Its contact details are on fsu.gov.dm. Do not rely on an agent’s summary of that answer.
3. Get the fee from the government, not a price list. The FSU fee schedule has no gaming line. A permit under s. 27(6) of the Small Charges Act would set fees in the permit itself.
4. Price tax without s. 109. Whatever vehicle is offered, the IBC exemption is gone.
5. Compare against regimes with a published fee law and register. On this site: Nevis (a 2025 ordinance and a public register), Anjouan, Curaçao, and the all-jurisdictions cost comparison. Belize is the closest case to this one: an older offshore offer that vendors still price after the government stopped issuing.

What we could not verify

• Whether any online gaming agreement or s. 27(6) permit is in force today, and on what terms.
• Whether the FSU still accepts gaming applications. Its homepage says it regulates gaming companies; its register lists none.
• The year missing from s. 5(1) of Act No. 6 of 2021, and whether late re-registrations are accepted.
• The tax position of a former IBC re-registered under the Companies Act.
• Every vendor figure in the table above. None was traceable to a primary source.