Adriano Ho expected to implement stricter gaming regulations

The new director of the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ), Adriano Ho, takes office today in his new role.
Ho has been working as an advisor to the Office of the Secretary for Security since 2014, gaining notoriety when, from 2004 to 2010, he headed the Macau branch of China’s National Central Bureau of Interpol.
In between the two positions, he also headed the Judiciary Police’s (PJ) Criminal Investigation Department for a period of two years, until he was appointed to head the PJ’s Gaming and Economic Crimes Investigation Department.
Ho’s experience in the field comes not only from the posts he held at the PJ but also from his latest position, in which he spent a year representing the security office in meetings with the DICJ, gaming operators and the security sector, to discuss topics related to casinos’ security measures.
In this capacity, he has acted as the link between the DICJ, the gaming operators, and the security forces.
Ho’s personality and skills remain a complete mystery to many gaming analysts, who prefer not to comment on the potential changes that he might enforce in the new post. However, local commentators stated their opinions to the Times regarding Ho’s biggest challenges and upcoming work.
Among those commentators was lawmaker José Pereira Coutinho, who said “I think Adriano Ho will do good work. We will have to be more attentive to [gaming] concession contracts, deadlines for compliance with contractual clauses, and [also] more attentive to the regulatory body [the DICJ],” implying that he believes Ho to be the right man for the job.
For Pereira Coutinho, the gaming concessionaires have been, over time, exempted from many duties that should be included under the concession responsibilities, such as the costs of managing and maintaining the Light Rapid Transit, the Macau Dome, the subsidy scheme to public buses concessionaires, as well as being included in the work of protecting and preserving cultural and heritage sites and monuments such as the Ruins of St. Paul’s, and Dom Pedro V Theatre.
For the legislator, when it comes to the new rules that would apply to the new concessions from 2022, “the gaming concessionaires must be required to do a total replacement of their [shuttle] bus fleets, cars, and motorcycles with others powered by environmentally-friendly energy.”
Pereira Coutinho also mentioned that the government, through the DICJ, should enforce tighter rules concerning all of those duties, establishing clear deadlines and sanctioning clauses for delayed compliance, non-compliance or defective compliance with the duties, presenting a report at the end of each year to the Legislative Assembly.
“For me, the most important are the concession contracts themselves, often with loopholes, omissions, or with a very broad scope that are very difficult to achieve [or to control effectively],” he said, noting this as the biggest challenge Ho must face in his new post.
Previously, in an exclusive interview with the Times, the former director of the DICJ, Paulo Martins Chan, also expressed his opinion that Ho is in a good position to do his job well, saying, “I believe that the government has carefully weighed their options before picking a name for the post and I also believe that he has all the conditions to do a good job.”
For Chan, Ho’s background and skills indicate an increasing influence of the security sector among the gaming sector, saying “I believe that the increasing and stricter enforcement of regulations has been already a direction followed in the past few years. He is a person that is aware of the realities of the gaming sector and in this sense has some advantage to implement [more measures] and to continue on [the] work [of regulating the sector].”
On the other hand, gaming analyst and chairman of the Macao Political Economy Research Association, Samuel Tong Kai Chung, has said on the topic that the post of director of DICJ is not an influential one in relation to the gaming law amendments that will establish the rules for the new tendering of gaming concessions.
For Tong, the change of the bureau’s head “won’t impact the direction that has been established, having little influence on policy decision-making,” he was cited as saying to Inside Asia Gaming.
Paulo Martins Chan is set to return to the Public Prosecutions Office.