Normally, when companies part ways, they paper it over with pleasantries, keeping it nice for public consumption and burning no bridges.

Which is why what's playing out in the Bahamas is noteworthy -- as though Harrah's withdrawal from the highly touted Baha Mar project weren't a story in itself. (And, to judge from the local papers, it isn't.) But it's not every day that one of the business partners left at the altar lets fly with private correspondence from the other.

From the excerpts quoted, it sounds as though Harrah's had some genuine causes for concern. It also sounds like, for all its expansionist talk, Harrah's is levered up to the gills right now. Charles Atwood, vice chair of Harrah's board, voices "considerable doubt about whether the project can be financed at all given the continuously deteriorating debt markets."

If Baha Mar can't be funded, what other Harrah's projects might be consigned to the back burner? When Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham says "the new owners of Harrah's were considering walking away from the deal" [emphasis added], the prospect of retrenchment under the new Apollo Mgmt./Texas Pacific regime has to be considered.

Harrah's concerns are serious enough for it to walk away from free land. Perhaps the government's contention that Baha Mar was insufficiently liquid but that Harrah's would pick up the slack scared Atwood & Co. away (it sure would give me pause if it was my money that was being 'volunteered' to make up somebody else's shortfall): Shades of London Clubs having to carry water for Jack Sommer when the uneasy duo were building the Aladdin (now Planet Hollywood) and running low on cash.

On the other hand, Baha Mar seems to have done most of the heavy lifting, including playing hardball with the prime minister. Whoever's at fault, with little visible construction underway and a March 18 groundbreaking postponed, somebody down there should have seen this coming.

In between scoring political points on the Bahamanian PM, opposition-party members noted ominously that, should an investor of Harrah's magnitude withdraw, few will want to take its place. After all, this was a project that the Bahamas was counting on to bring in 3,450 hotels and (among many other stats) and an average GDP contribution of $740,000 a year.

However, even after the disclosure of the Atwood letter, local political figures appear to be coalescing around their preferred narrative: That big, helpless Harrah's, stung by "intemperate" remarks by PM Ingraham, hied itself hence in a fit of pique. Good try ... but no. Companies of Harrah's magnitude generally don't behave like spoilt six-year-old brats.

Ingraham, for his part, has put it upon Baha Mar to move forward as though Harrah's hadn't withdrawn -- and still meet its March  2009 deadline ... Who says there's no sense of fantasy in politics?