Packer: Detainees are his priority
Employees of Australian gaming giant Crown Resorts could be cooling their heels for more than a year in a Chinese detention facility.
The 17 staff members, including head of international VIP relations Jason O’Connor, were detained last October for reported “whale-hunting,” or marketing to high-rolling gamblers in Mainland China.
China prohibits touring companies from organizing travel groups of 10 or more Chinese citizens to gamble abroad, and in 2015 the government warned gaming operators not to violate those rules. Crown Resorts allegedly tried to sidestep them by continuing to dispatch marketers to the People’s Republic.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs informed the Australian Financial Review that the Chinese investigation “is ongoing and could continue for over a year.” During that time, the employees—three Australians and 15 Chinese residents—will be held at the Shanghai Detention Center.
According to AFR, the staffers are spending their fourth month in an unheated jail in sub-zero temperatures. Previous inmates have said detainees are housed 15 to a cell and share a single toilet.
The Crown employees have been accused of “gambling-related crimes” and have no hard information on the actual charges they may eventually face, but China’s government-controlled judiciary has a conviction rate of more than 99 percent once charges are filed. A team of South Korean casino staffers convicted for gambling-related crimes in China were released in 2016 after 16 months behind bars.
Crown’s majority shareholder, billionaire James Packer, who returned to the company’s board of directors in recent weeks, said his chief priority is “managing through the whole China situation.”
The arrests, which occurred during a series of overnight raids in at least four cities across China, are believed to be part of Operation Chain Break, a campaign launched in 2015 by China’s Public Security Bureau to stem the flow of Chinese money into foreign casinos.
According to a December report in Bloomberg News, Crown insiders believe the company “made powerful enemies by attempting to cut out and poach customers from established Asian-based junket operators in order to avoid paying them commissions.” U Io Hung, chairman of the CC UE VIP Club junket group, told the news outlet, “Crown went over themselves to look for clients. I told them they should be careful, but they just wanted revenue.”
