The Macau government has set aside a provision in the licenses of two of its six casino operators that requires them to hand over their properties and everything inside them in March.
The decision was reported by the news portal GamblingCompliance citing a senior executive from one of the two operators, Sociedade de Jogos de Macau and MGM China, whose concession expirations were pushed forward earlier this year from March 2020 to June 2022 to coincide with those of the other four.
The provision states that all casinos and casino equipment “shall automatically revert to the (government) without compensation” when the concessions are terminated. It was written to give the government legal grounds for ensuring the properties would continue to operate without interruption.
The provision, which technically applies to all six licensees, is being set aside to bring it into line with SJM’s and MGM’s new concession expiration date.
Each concession was originally granted for 20 years, and the earlier expirations for SJM and MGM were the result of a glitch in the initial award process dating back to when the government opened the market to competition at the turn of the century. SJM had been the city’s sole operator at the time, having been created out of the monopoly that existed previously. MGM, which came to the market later as a sub-concession of SJM, had been included in SJM’s earlier dating.
