Macau VIP gaming promoter Jimei International Entertainment Group has quit the casino junket business and is moving into film production.
The publicly traded company is now called Starlight Culture Entertainment Group, it said in a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange?to “better reflect the recent change of control of the company and provide the company with a new corporate image and identity”.
As part of the new strategy, Starlight said it has engaged two international film directors “in relation to the development and production of motion picture projects”. They are Felix Gary Gray, whose credits include “Straight Outta Compton” and “The Italian Job,” and Roland Emmerich, who directed “Independence Day: Resurgence” and “The Day After Tomorrow”.
The filing follows the exit of Jimei’s founder, longtime junketeer Jack Lam, who sold his controlling interest in the public company in April and resigned as chairman and an executive director in May.
Lam, who barely avoided arrest in the Philippines last year in the wake of a bribery and tax evasion scandal related to his operations in the island nation, continues to run the privately held Jimei Group, whose interests include VIP rooms in several Macau casinos, junkets in and around East Asia and Australia, and Macau’s 15-table Casino Jimei, a sub-licensee of the SJM casino concession.
