Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands is under investigation by authorities in the city-state and by the U.S. Justice Department over reputed discrepancies in transfers to third parties of large amounts of cash belonging to gambling customers of the megaresort.
A Bloomberg News report said the investigations were launched in part in response to a 2019 lawsuit against the resort filed by a patron who claimed that S$9.1 million (US$6.7 million) of his money was transferred to other gamblers without his knowledge.
The action was settled out of court after the casino agreed to reimburse the gambler in full with no admission of liability. In its review of the case, Singapore’s Casino Regulatory Authority said that while the casino didn’t breach regulations, including those relating to anti-money laundering “there were weaknesses in MBS’ casino control measures pertaining to fund transfers.”
An earlier in-house review at MBS also had uncovered instances of employees not complying with proper standards by filling in payment details on pre-signed or photo-copied authorization forms. There were also cases in which original documents had been destroyed.
Legal third-party cash transfers are a common practice in Asia, where groups of wealthy gamblers are known to pool winnings and losses at different casinos. The transfers are sometimes made through junket operators, who provide transportation, credit and other perks to high rollers. In China the junkets are an indispensable link in the VIP trade, enabling gamblers to evade the country’s strict capital controls, often by pledging assets held in China in exchange for credit.
Between 2013 and 2017, more than 3,000 letters of authorization were processed at Marina Bay Sands to endorse transfers of funds from patrons to third parties worth about S$1.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg report.
In July, the U.S. Justice Department interviewed a former compliance chief at Marina Bay Sands in its probe into whether anti-money laundering procedures had been breached in handling high rollers, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.
Las Vegas Sands, Marina Bay Sands’ U.S.-based owner, has hired a prominent Singapore law firm, Davider Singh Chambers, to represent it in the investigations, the report said.
