Inside Asian Gaming

August 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 9 dominating,” said Hoffman Ma, who heads the company that operates Ponte 16 casino and hotel, one of the SJM satellites. Neptune Group, the Hong Kong listed parent of one of the city’s biggest junkets, told Reuters it’s looking to acquire VIP room operators. NASDAQ-traded Asia Entertainment & Resources, another prominent junketeer, also expects to be a buyer and said it is considering a dual listing on the HKSE to fund its expansion plans. Reports are that affiliates of SunCity and some other major players might also test the public markets. Mr Ng and Ms Chen are no longer a pair, having fallen out over their respective rights in Greek Mythology and its host hotel. Or perhaps it’s a love gone sour, as some suggest. In any event, things had been getting increasingly ugly between them in the weeks preceding the attack. A ‘Beautiful War’ It could be that the thinking in Beijing back at the turn of the century was the junkets would fade in importance once STDM’s monopoly was permitted to expire and outside investment began to transform Macau into a respectable leisure destination. That might have been naïve. There are now upwards of 200 of them, companies and individuals, holding licenses from the Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau. A troublesome legacy of the bad old days, perhaps, but they have not only survived into the new era, they’ve also been its mainstay, delivering the high rollers who generate 70% or more of casino revenues, supplying and assuming the risk for most of the credit that greases the wheels, and functioning ultimately as the largest source of government revenue. Something like US$500 billion a year in rolling chip volume passes through these sprawling networks— and, to be sure, their secret partners and investors—and yet the machine has managed to fly smoothly beneath the radar while driving GGR growth from around US$3 billion a decade ago to more than $33 billion, the equivalent of five LasVegas Strips. They’ve done it in the teeth of currency and travel restrictions, with no formal banking infrastructure to support them and no system for adjudicating conflicts in civil law. In the process, they’ve been instrumental in sustaining the fortunes of three of the world’s largest publicly traded resort conglomerates. Wynn Resorts, Las Vegas Sands and MGM Resorts International now proudly call themselves Chinese companies, as well they should. At 91, Stanley Ho, who presided over this world for about as long as anyone can remember, has faded into ill health to leave 17 children and various wives and concubines to squabble over his fortune. As for the likes of Street Market Wai and Broken Tooth Wan, no doubt they’re puzzling over how they fit into the new order. If it’s true of themanwho calls himself Ng Man Sun that he invented themodern junket systemwith Dr Ho back in the 1980s, then he is in his hospital room now up on Guia Hill, looking down from Macau’s highest point at a city he largely helped create. On that same promontory the policeman Antonio Marques Baptista had gone jogging the day his car exploded in flames It appears that Mr Ng, at 65, has no intention of going quietly. His ex-lover bamboozled him, so he claims, persuading him to hand over a controlling interest in the New Century for the promise of a land grant on Cotai that never materialized. Worse, he believes she’s cuckolded him, according to a tabloid story making the rounds in Hong Kong. A recent visitor to his hospital bed reported him morose, uninterested in talking. He has answered his attackers by taking out an ad in the Chinese-language Macau Daily News offering HK$10 million for information on the “mastermind” behind them. In December, Wan Kuok Koi expects to walk out a free man from a special security wing of the Estabelecimento Prisional de Macau out on Coloane island. He will be 57. It is difficult to imagine that he has lost his taste for the limelight in the years he’s been away. Triad members are said to comprise two-thirds of the male inmates of the Prisional , where reports have it that Mr Wan enjoys female visitors and has use of a mobile phone. Reputedly a protégé of Mr Ng early in his career, by the late ’90s, they had become bitter rivals. In July 1997, at the height of the triad wars, the front of the New Century was strafed with gunfire. In the interview Mr Wan gave to Time , he spoke at length of their feud, promising to wage a “beautiful war” against Street Market Wai and vowing to “wipe him out”. Mr Wan’s lawyer, Pedro Redinha, avers that his client has no intention of returning to the lifehe ledbeforehewent away.Moreover, he intends to prove his innocence.“He wants to come to my office to re-examine his case and the grounds for his imprisonment,” Mr Redinha told the South China Morning Post last spring. “I’m absolutely sure he will contact me on his release. He still feels it was an unfair ruling.” In anticipation, according to a more recent Post report, casino executives are beefing up their personal security. Cover Story If it’s true of the man who calls himself Ng Man Sun that he invented the modern junket system with Stanley Ho back in the 1980s, then he is in his hospital room now up on Guia Hill, looking down from Macau’s highest point at a city he largely helped create.