Inside Asian Gaming

January 2016 inside asian gaming 21 “At a time when investing in Asia was a winding road for any Western casino operator, Macau had the ability to provide enough confidence for multi- billion dollar resorts to be raised from a swamp … literally.” Rules of the game banking or pharmaceutical industries. The easy flow of untraceable capital, exposure of consumers to fraudulent practices and the social consequences of uncontrolled vice are just too dangerous and often too present to be left only to casino stakeholders’ mutual sympathy of sentiments . The end goals of gaming policy are fairly common to most jurisdictions where the industry is allowed but regulated. The ways to achieve them, however, vary widely and are hardly replicable in different places or times. To this point, the regulatory strategy adopted by the Macau government in the early 2000s was, by any standard, extremely successful. The proof is right there for anyone to see: it is spelled out in its unprecedented tax revenues and employment rates and photographed in the incredible properties that generate them. At a time when investing in Asia was a winding road for any Western casino operator, Macau had the ability to provide enough confidence for multi-billion dollar resorts to be raised from a swamp … literally. Simultaneously, it was able to convince highly scrutinizing overseas regulators that its legal system – inherited from a recent political transition of a four hundred-year old administration – would not drop the core standards imposed on their operators back home. As fascinating as it may seem, Macau’s biggest achievement was that it did all