Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2011 4 Editorial Inside Asian Gaming is published by Must Read Publications Ltd 8J Ed. Comercial Si Toi 619 Avenida da Praia Grande Macau Tel: (853) 2832 9980 For subscription enquiries, please email subs@asgam.com For advertising enquiries, please email ads@asgam.com or call: (853) 6680 9419 www.asgam.com Inside Asian Gaming is an official media partner of: http://www.gamingstandards.com Publisher Kareem Jalal Director João Costeira Varela Editor Michael Grimes Business Development Manager José Ho Contributors Desmond Lam, Steve Karoul I. Nelson Rose, Richard Marcus Shenée Tuck, James J. Hodl Andrew MacDonald William R. Eadington Graphic Designer Brenda Chao Photography Ike Michael Grimes We crave your feedback. Please email your comments tomichael@asgam.com Learning to Love Big Brother “History is written by the winners,” wrote the novelist George Orwell in an essay in 1944. For most of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century the winners have been the United States and its Western allies. So when the US State Department says in its 2011 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report published this month that Macau is “vulnerable to becoming a hub for the laundering of criminal proceeds”, it’s starting from the assumption that Macau is inherently more vulnerable to such activity than, say, Wall Street, where Bernard Madoff was able to launder the proceeds of the US$18 billion fraud a court-appointed trustee estimated he perpetrated on his investors. It’s interesting to note who is and isn’t on the list of jurisdictions of ‘concern’ in the Narcotics Control report. Friendly ones such as Canada and the United Kingdom are listed—apparently on the basis that in open democratic societies a free trade in crime and terrorism can flourish as well as a free trade in goods and services. Saudi Arabia is not on the list, even though one of the world’s allegedly most accomplished money launderers, Osama bin Laden, is from a prominent Saudi family. This is what the 9/11 Commission Report said about that country: “Saudi Arabia has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. Before 9/11 the Saudi and US governments did not fully share intelligence information or develop an adequate joint effort to track and disrupt the finances of the al Qaeda organization.” Presumably intelligence cooperation between the two countries is now so thorough that Saudi Arabia is no longer a worry. Its omission from the State Department list is clearly nothing to do with the fact the kingdom is facing internal political dissent at an extraordinarily turbulent period in modern Arab history, that it’s a vital strategic ally of the US and that it’s a major supplier of US energy needs. The US strategic interest in Macau is slighter, though it was highlighted back in 2007 in the US embargo against Banco Delta Asia for its alleged assistance to North Korea. The fact four US-listed companies are investing more than US$9 billion in casino infrastructure in Macau may also focus minds in Washington DC regarding Macau’s financial probity. Some US investors who lost money in Viva Macau—a low-fares regional airline that folded in April last year—felt it appropriate to trigger a US State Department investigation by complaining to US politicians they had been defrauded through a combination of conspiracy by commercial rivals and the Macau government’s withdrawal of the airline’s operating licence. It might make the investors and their backers feel a little better about the world for a few weeks, but in the long run it won’t make any difference. That Viva Macau bird has flown. Try reading Tim Clissold’s book ‘Mr China: A Memoir’. The long reach of US Federal investigators can be applied to scrutinise US companies abroad as well as to defend US business interests overseas. That seems to be what is happening at Sands China. Acting Sands China CEO Michael Leven said recently he believed that US Department of Justice and US Securities and Exchange Commission investigations into the company had been triggered by allegations made in US court documents by Steve Jacobs, a former Sands China CEO, in a wrongful dismissal suit. It could be that these investigations too will turn out to be the rustlings of a paper tiger. The die was cast when the regulatory authorities in Nevada gave their approval for the Las Vegas casino operators to invest in Macau. If Macau was a fit and proper place to do business at that time, it is certainly a fit and proper place to do business now. If anything, there are many more financial and regulatory safeguards and processes in place in Macau now than there were back in 2002 when the names of the concession and sub-concession winners were first announced by the government. Of more concern to the Macau government and casino investors are the State Department’s claims that the real figures for gross gaming revenue in Macau could be ten times the official ones quoted by Macau’s gaming regulator the DICJ because of the thorny issue of private side betting (aka ‘the multiplier’) in VIP rooms. An interesting question is how reliable is the source of US information on this issue? If the WikiLeaks saga proves anything it’s that inter- and intra- governmental gossip can often get dressed up and repackaged as ‘intelligence’. Who knows, someone might even have got the ten times multiple figure from this publication. Now that’s a flattering (and sobering) thought. Peace in Our Time? Press reports that the Ho family has ended its ‘Trial by YouTube’—and settled the two-month long dispute over control of Dr Stanley Ho’s shares in his casino parent company STDM—will make many people in the region breathe a single sigh of relief. We say ‘a single sigh’ because like the Korean War, no official peace treaty has yet been signed. Let’s hope none of the parties to the dispute take a leaf out of Kim Jong Il’s book and start lobbing shells at the other side long after everyone else thought things were settled.