Inside Asian Gaming

October 2010 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 37 Cambodia casino tables and 500-plus slot machines. Chateau Bavet, developed by the Malaysian slot manufacturer RGB in the border casino town of Bavet, has 60 tables and 170 hotel rooms on its own. It all adds up in theory to a healthy second-tier market for casino equipment suppliers. A number of the major equipment suppliers do not, however, sell directly into the border casinos because of concerns about the financial probity of some of those operations and the possibility of falling foul of the regulators in their home markets. Those suppliers are probably right to be cautious. Many border properties in Asia are by definition provincial—stuck in the wild and woolly outer reaches of countries that may already have a somewhat sketchy interpretation of niceties such as anti-money laundering laws or copyright rules. If some Asian border casinos are willing cheerfully to rip off the name of a major Las Vegas brand and pick it out in neon lights on the front of the property, what could be going on in the darker recesses of its counting room and on its balance sheet, not to mention in the offices or minds of its local ‘regulator’? The answer is, we don’t know and are unlikely to learn more any time soon. The companies involved are usually privately held. Provided they satisfy the local authorities by paying whatever licence fee and/or tax liabilities they have, then what happens to the money after that is apparently nobody’s business but theirs. Some of these border entities have managements shrewd enough to put citizens from Western countries in middle or senior management positions, but how much oversight they have of the money is anybody’s guess. Cambodia’s border casinos have sprung up within the last ten years—many of them in a sudden growth spurt in the last five years, riding on the back of a general upswing in optimism about rising gaming industry revenues in Asia. But if recent events are anything to go by, many of them could disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. Winn Casino Bavet—not living up to the performance of its near namesake