Testimony continued last week in the trial of billionaire Alvin Chau, former head of Macau junket Suncity, indicted with 20 others on charges of illegal gambling, operating a criminal syndicate, fraud and money laundering.
According to Inside Asian Gaming, it was the job of Wong Long Peng, director of the compliance audit division at Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ), to review monthly financial statements from the company when it was still doing business. She testified that she never saw information that linked it to under-the-table betting or online betting.
“The financial statements provided by Suncity were not very different from the commission information provided by the concessionaires,” she said.
In under-the-table betting, high rollers and junket operators conspire to place bigger bets in Macau’s VIP rooms than indicated by the chips on the table. The practice allegedly allowed them to defraud both the local government and the city’s casinos, costing them billions in revenues and taxes. Per Macau Business, billions more may have been laundered through transfers from front companies and “underground banks” in Mainland China. The warrant for Chau’s arrest reportedly charged him with “severely damaging the social order of the country.”
Local news reports also detailed the testimony of two women who worked in Suncity’s exchange rate department. They described a multi-step money transfer system in which Chinese high rollers funneled capital to or from mainland bank accounts to Suncity’s VIP rooms.
The process included determining the daily exchange rate from renminbi to Hong Kong dollars, then “randomly selecting a person from a list of people” who also had mainland bank accounts and Suncity accounts, and asking the latter to help facilitate the transfer of funds on behalf of the gambler.
“I got as many as 100 calls every day asking about the exchange rate and assistance with money transfers,” said one of the witnesses, Leong Wai I.
Two of Chau’s personal assistants testified that they each held shares in more than 10 mainland companies on behalf of Suncity, and did so at the request of Cheung Ling, aka Zhang Ningning, the ninth defendant in this case. Zhang has already been sentenced to seven years in prison in a separate case about cross-border gambling involving Chau.
The two employees said they made more than MOP100,000 (US$12,360) per month in 2019, when the median monthly salary of Macau residents was MOP20,000. Prosecutor Lai U Hou suggested that their compensation was a reward for them for keeping shares in Chinese companies on behalf of Suncity.
A rundown of the trial in MoneyWeek said “no one did more to advance” the Macau’ gaming “gold rush” than Chau, the wunderkind whose VIP clients were known to wager up to $1 million on a single hand, according to Nikkei Asia.
The report said Chau’s arrest last November “sent shockwaves through the Asia-Pacific gambling world,” because Beijing “had for years tolerated Suncity’s activities, despite rumors of links to organized crime…. Within Macau, Chau was viewed as a pillar of the community.”
University of Macau Professor Emeritus Hao Zhidong told Time magazine that Chau’s arrest affects “the way gambling has always been done” in Macau, once the world’s premier gaming destination.
If convicted, the 47-year-old faces decades in prison.
