It is now widely expected that the ruling by Jamaica's Supreme Court that Olint Corporation is involved in securities trading and therefore subject to regulation by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) will go all the way to the United Kingdom-based Privy Council.

Indeed, Olint has already made preliminary moves to appeal the verdict in the local Court of Appeal, a process that is likely to last several months. After that, whichever side loses, the next step will probably be to London and the Privy Council, Jamaica's court of last resort.

The entire process will likely take several years. This first phase alone has lasted more than a year.

In the meantime, however, uncertainty will remain about the status of the so-calle investment schemes, and they will continue to exist in a shadowy place in the market. That cannot be good for Jamaica, which has been attempting to market itself as an open and transparent economy that is a good place to do business.

The issue, of course, transcends Olint or LewFam, the two ostensible foreign-exchange trading clubs that challenged the FSC's jurisdiction over their operations. The Jamaican market is riddled with a plethora of unregulated investment entities, whose bona fides are far from clear. They have pulled, people suspect, billions of dollars of cash from mainly poorer Jamaican with he promise of extraordinarily high returns.

What is not clear, however, is how these operations, especially those which say they are not engaged in foreign-exchange trading, can make these returns. They tell of no credible investment strategy and publish no account and when they do, the information provided is, at best, opaque.

The stern reluctance of these operations to be transparent adds to the suspicion that some of these operations may be Ponzi schemes - or worse. But in circumstances of economic privation, it is not surprising that many people, including large numbers of those who can least afford to lose it, continue to pump their cash into and hold faith with these schemes.

Should any of these schemes go belly-up, they can blame the commercial banks, whose clumsy efforts at enforcement of know-your-customer rules handed their detractors a powerful public-relations tool, which is already in use.

The 'alternatives' too are benefiting from amoral voices from fundamentalist pulpits, which see nothing wrong with a loss of transparency once the money flows. Perhaps in ignorance rather than dishonesty, they point to profits by banks and fail to look at real return ratios; or do voodoo mathematics to arrive at a percentage return on a specific bank product and use these to justify the untested numbers of others.

In these circumstances, the Government has an obligation to act in the interest of the widest constituency of Jamaicans and to ensure that this is a place where, even as people take risks, business is conducted in an orderly and transparent environment. In that regard, even as the Olint matter works its way through the courts, the administration should move to clarify, via legislation, who or what falls under which rules.

At the same time, it should initiate a broader discussion on the structure of the financial markets to ensure a framework that accommodates new ideas, creating space for the innovators while protecting consumers from the charlatans.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.