Inside Asian Gaming

September 2013 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 35 The Asian Gaming 50 – 2013 of the high-roller volume, although the property has relationships with some 30 different operatives. Last year saw the opening of the company’s first sales offices in Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok. The property also is embarking on a “transformational”VIP program, in the words of investment analyst Grant Govertsen of Union Gaming Research Macau. New VIP facilities have opened at the property with more in the works (including 50 private gaming salons at Naga2), and new junket operators have been recruited to bring in players. In 2014, a private Naga terminal is scheduled to open at Phnom Penh’s international airport. Mr Chen, who trained as a medical doctor before turning to property development and gaming, landed on Forbes ’ list of billionaires for the first time this year on the back of NagaCorp’s surging share price. When he first made it onto Forbes ’ “Malaysia’s Richest” in 2009, his net worth was estimated at US$195 million. Since then, NagaCorp’s share price has risenmore than 500%. His gamble on NagaWorld was a bold one. He put in the bid for the casino in 1994 as efforts were still under way to bring peace to Cambodia after years of civil war. With no experience in gaming, he set out to get into the business when the Khmer Rouge was still active and was not even clear whether the new government would survive. And he proposed making the investment well before regional mass tourism had taken off and a decade before Asia’s casino boom got rolling with the opening of Macau to competition. The unlikely venture, launched on a barge on the Mekong River, got started slowly. But since then, NagaCorp’s success has closely tracked Cambodia’s progress as a nation and has grown with it. The first Cambodian company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it has played an integral role in shaping the country’s increasing appeal among tourists, investors and the international business community. His ugly and protracted falling-out with Steve Wynn drags on, and Kazuo Okada isn’t wavering in his determination to turn the tables on his former partner and accuser and reverse the battering his reputation has suffered. With equal doggedness he continues to pursue his Philippines “dream,” as Universal Entertainment characterizes the US$2 billion mix of high-end gaming and leisure attractions he’s counting on at Manila’s new Entertainment City resort complex to establish him as a regional operator to be reckoned with. Mr Okada’s vision for Manila Bay Resorts, as it’s called, is indeed immense—2,000 hotel rooms, 3,000 slot machines, 500 table games, an expansive luxury residential component, the world’s largest oceanarium. He’s already pumped in an estimated $500 million. Ground has broken. Nothing short of a criminal indictment, and perhaps not even that, would induce him to relinquish it. Looking at what it has cost him to date it’s obvious that the stakes couldn’t be any higher—by the boards went his friendship with Steve Wynn and a very lucrative investment in Wynn Resorts; it’s jeopardized his machine gaming business in the US, where he is also under investigation; it may well have led the South Korean government to reject his bid to develop a destination resort in Incheon; quite possibly it could doom any plans he might have for a casino 22 Kazuo Okada Chairman Universal Entertainment Corp franchise in his home country. You could say he’s all in. The good thing is that the powers that be in the Philippines appear to have little choice but to let him see it through despite the embarrassment his legal troubles has caused them, which is good for everyone concerned because there are still moments when it all seems dangerously close to unraveling. His pressing need, as of this writing, was to secure a credible partner or partners to take a majority stake in the land under the resort and thereby resolve, or so it’s hoped, the criminal charges he and 25 Filipinos and Japanese connected with the project could face under a finding by the Philippines Justice Department that dummy companies were set up to evade rules on foreign ownership of land and other rights. Intertwined in this controversy is an alleged bribery scheme involving a politically connected businessman who is among those named in the ownership probe. This second and far more serious investigation had stalled at one point over the reluctance of witnesses to testify, but it appears now to have gathered fresh steam amid reports that the country’s former top gaming regulator may have been involved. Universal denies any wrongdoing on both accounts, and Mr Okada, perhaps taking a page fromWynn’s success in ousting him, has countered with an investigation of his own into the bribery allegations, conducted in the friendlier confines of Japan, that has traced the “illegal flow of funds” into the Philippines, as the company terms it, to rogue executives. With similar resourcefulness he’sworking to slot in a new Filipino-Chinese money man as a partner—real estate and retail magnate Andrew Tan—to replace the old one—John Gokongwei, who exited the project earlier this year, reportedly because the two sides could not agree on terms. A tie-up with Mr Tan, should Mr Okada pull it off, could solve a host of problems. Mr Tan’s Alliance Global has been involved with Manila Bay Resorts as a prospective investor in its residential component. Alliance also is one half of the joint venture that owns the Philippines’ largest and most successful casino, Resorts World Manila, and is licensed to develop one of Entertainment City’s four licensed megaresorts. In the meantime, Universal says it is “cooperatively” working with the government, and has been for more than a year, to resolve the land ownership issues, and the company has been assured, it says, that it will have “until the completion of the development” to do so.