Top Macau Junket Figure Under InvestigationFormer Portuguese Colony Sees Another Setback |
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According to The Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong has launched a money-laundering investigating into a top junket operator in Macau.
Cheung Chi Tai, who reportedly has disputed ties to the Neptune Guangdong Group, has had his assets frozen, the report added. Seven of his “closely held” companies are being looked at.
Police with Hong Kong’s Organized and Serious Crimes Ordinance haven’t yet been able to locate Cheung. A late February hearing on the matter has been scheduled.
The WSJ report added that Cheung was identified as a high-ranking triad figure in a 1992 U.S. Senate subcommittee report on Asian organized crime.
Junkets, which have come under scrunitity by anti-corruption campaigns from mainland China, reportedly are trying to clean up their resepective images. In April, there was a disappearance of a Macau junket figure believed to owe as much as $1.3 billion.
Nearly 220 junkets are licensed in Macau.
The reason why junkets are so important in Macau?
Junket operators recruit gamblers in China, lend them money for betting in Macau, and later handle the debt collection. Their customers accounted for nearly two-thirds, or $30 billion, of last year’s casino revenue in Macau…feeding high rollers into a city that generated seven times the gambling revenue of the Las Vegas Strip.
Macau casinos won more than $45 billion last year from gamblers, but there will be a year-over-year decline for the first time in around a decade. November saw the sixth-straight month of decline.
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