Inside Asian Gaming

IAG OCT 2022年10月 亞博匯 66 Fresh fromthe parliamentary committee submitting its report and hot on the heels of another unlikely piece of legislation – the decriminalization of marijuana for medical and industrial purposes – passing into law, the question today seems to be when, not if, Thailand welcomes a legalized casino industry. “It is definitely a bipartisan issue now,” says Paul Bromberg, CEO of Spectrum Asia and a long-time resident of Thailand. “There has been some concern expressed about social impact by the Buddhist Sangha church, but I think if they can legalize marijuana, casinos aren’t that hard to get through. That seems to be the general thought. “I think if they want to do it, they can do it and they can do it fairly quickly. Generally speaking, the movement has started towards legalization and it looks likely to happen sooner rather than later.” The real issue, Bromberg says, is no longer whether casinos will become a reality, but what those casinos will look like from a regulatory and operational point of view. Fittingly, his comments were made during a conference session at the recent G2E Asia Special Edition: Singapore at Marina Bay Sands – a venue still widely considered to be Asia’s gold standard when it comes to integrated resort developments, but one not so simple to emulate. “We’re sitting here in this amazing building (MBS) and a lot of people in these countries think they will just pass the law and it will happen, it will be like Singapore, but they don’t see all the hard work that goes in by the bureaucrats to actually draft and enforce the law," he explains. “It really is a lot of hard work and [when we] talk about Thailand, I have my doubts that they will be able to build something equal to what we see in Singapore.” Bromberg also doubts what sort of regulatory environment potential investors might face when weighing up the pros and cons of entering the Thai market. “There has been talk in the past about some of the big casinos such as Las Vegas Sands moving into Vietnam; now they are said to be looking at Thailand. But why would they FEATURES Paul Bromberg, CEO of Spectrum Asia Spectrum Asia公司行政總裁Paul Bromberg