Las Vegas high-rollers beat odds to win cut of Asian casino millions

Scotsman.com News - International - Las Vegas high-rollers beat odds to win cut of Asian casino millions Las Vegas high-rollers beat odds to win cut of Asian casino millions BEN ROBERTSON IN MACAU IT SEEMS that Cai Shen, the Chinese god of Fortune, is smiling benevolently on Macau these days. Inside its golden chrome-panelled exterior, the Las Vegas-funded Macau Sands Casino is already changing the way the former Portuguese colony does business. Opened in May, Sands is the first in a long list of planned casinos and hotel resorts that supporters hope will make their city the gambling centre of Asia, if not the world. Returned to China in 1999, this small group of islands has been trying hard to clean up its image. Locking up the Triad gang members who made the city infamous in the 1990s with their racketeering and almost daily acts of violence, the city government decided three years ago to throw open the casino’s doors to foreign competition. Formerly under the control of one company, the Sociedade de Jogos de Macau, run by 82-year-old Dr Stanley Ho, one of Asia’s richest men, the city’s casinos were showing all the hallmarks of monopoly-driven complacency. Dingy, smoke-filled gaming floors, lousy service and grubby carpets may once have been acceptable to gamblers with nowhere else to go, but since the opening of Sands attitudes are changing. "I love the high ceiling and sense of open space," said Wang Yuan, 23, who had travelled from the neighbouring mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai to inspect Sands’s football pitch-sized games floor. With 277 gaming tables, 519 slot machines and the largest chandelier on the planet, Sands is only the beginning. The owner, Venetian Macau Ltd - the company that built the namesake hotel in Las Vegas - is planning a £6.7 billion-£8.4 billion), 60,000-room, 22-hotel project complete with casinos and big-name shows. But it is not the only group in on the act. Las Vegas visionary Steve Wynn is building his own 200-table casino, and MGM is also planning to break ground. Reclaiming land from the South China Sea, Macau expects to have more than 30 major resort hotels by 2009, the majority built with United States backing. "The gaming industry in Macau has a long history, since the late 1800s," said Manuel Joaquim das Neves, the head of the Gaming Inspection and Co-operation Bureau. When Macau was a Portuguese trading post, gambling revenues were seen as a quick and easy way to boost the colony’s coffers, an incentive that still holds sway today. Bringing in revenues of $373 million (£209 million) for the treasury in the first five months of this year alone - an increase of 32 per cent over the same time last year - gambling remains the primary source of income for the government. The feeling now is that the city needs to diversify its economic base. "The aim of this process of liberalisation is not just to enhance the gaming facilities but to bring in new ideas, a new image to the city so that Macau would be about more than just casinos and nightclubs," Mr Neves added. In effect aiming to mirror the success of The Strip, which 20 years ago was only famous for its casinos, Macau hopes to use Las Vegas know-how to reposition itself as a destination for families, business conventions, sightseeing and shopping. With a Disneyland due to open in Hong Kong next year and regulations regarding individual travel from mainland China being relaxed, all indicators are pointing to an explosion in traveller numbers. Macau boasts a population of just 440,000, but last year saw some 12 million tourists travel to this Chinese Special Administrative Region, almost double the number from ten years before. With just under half of these from the Chinese mainland, where gambling remains illegal, these figures are expected to continue to increase, so that by 2009 gaming receipts alone will exceed even those of Las Vegas. "We need to monitor the impact of tourism," says Glenn McCartney, of the Macau Institute for Tourism Studies. "In Macau, the general consensus is that the development of the gaming industry will increase taxes and create jobs, but what about the effects on traffic congestion, property prices, gambling addiction and crime? How do we balance Macau’s vibrant community with the manufactured experience of the casino?" Already Macau, with its picturesque Roman Catholic churches and winding streets, is feeling the effects. House prices have risen by between 5 per cent and 10 per cent since the start of the year, and concerns are being voiced by smaller businesses that the rush of new jobs is inflating staff salary expectations. Budget airlines Ryanair and Virgin Blue have both been in talks with the local Macau Air about possible link-ups. Whereas before, the Triad gangs used to roam the casino floors offering loan-shark services and charging customers a fee to use the high-roller VIP rooms, Mr Neves is adamant that those days are over. He said: "The police lost control back in the 1990s, but now with co-operation between Macau, Hong Kong and mainland China, the situation has improved." Even so, metal detectors remain at all casino entrances. At the Sands, they euphemistically say they are there to search for cameras, while the older establishments still post a "no guns or knives" sign beside the detector. "Of course, the Triads are still here," noted one taxi driver, as ever a reliable source of popular sentiment. "But they are frightened of the Communist Party; they fear the Liberation Army," he said, forming his hand into a gun and then pointing it at the nape of his neck, China’s preferred method of execution. Even so, a long-running family feud between casino mogul Stanley Ho and his 81-year-old wife Winnie has led to claims of possible ties between Macau’s casinos and organised crime. The allegations and counter claims have made essential reading in Hong Kong’s press. According to reports released by his sister, Stanley Ho’s casinos were being used to funnel some of the billions of Chinese renminbi (people’s currency) that illegally exit China every year. Using go-betweens, people could allegedly make a deposit in Renminbi on the mainland and then collect a cheque, cash or gambling chips for the same amount in Hong Kong dollars from one of Dr Ho’s casinos. Mr Ho, whose gambling interests have made him one of the most powerful men in southern China - has vehemently denied the allegations made by his sister, who has been engaged in a long-running legal dispute with him. As his business empire accounts for around two-thirds of the Macanese economy, it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to get to the bottom of Dr Ho’s finances. But it is against this background US investors arrive on the islands to redevelop the gambling business. Bound by the strictures of the Nevada Gaming Commission, many of the locals hope these investments will bring a much-needed breath of clean air - and, at the very least, a bit more colour on the casino floor.