Goa shores
One of the many open secrets now tumbling into the media spotlight as part of the Louis Berger bribery case involves Goa’s deeply unpopular casinos, via the accused Hawala operator, Raychand Soni, who was arrested by the Goa police last week for supplying tens of millions in cash to be paid in bribes to former chief minister Digambar Kamat, and former state public works department minister Churchill Alemao,” The Times of India wrote yesterday in an opinion article that draws many comparisons between the Indian state and the MSAR’s gaming industry.
According to the Indian paper, the crime branch testified that “casinos are running on Soni’s funds.” It appears that huge sums of cash have been continuously funneled through Soni’s shop in Panaji since 2009 – “all part of the ocean of ‘black money’ that is awash everywhere in India, where there is more unaccounted money than the rest of the world combined. Like the property market – which has also seen a highly inflated bubble in Goa.”
“Make no mistake,” argues the paper, “money laundering is the bread and butter of the casino industry wherever it has established itself in the world.”
In Australia, a Vietnamese criminal named Pete Hoang generated an estimated turnover of USD1 billion between 2000 and 2012. Just a few weeks ago, the US treasury department’s financial crimes enforcement network levied one of its biggest ever fines – an incredible $75 million – against the Tinian Dynasty Hotel & Casino on the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth, for “willful and egregious” violations of money-laundering rules. This closely follows another $10 million fine imposed on the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for similar violations.
In spite of that recent history, “it should be noted that there are strict regulations in the USA, and [there] remains some measure of oversight and law enforcement,” writes the paper.
“[In Goa], the situation is much more like that of Macau, where the casinos are rigged as money laundry machines, and organized crime dominates from behind the scenes.” According to secret diplomatic cables released by the whistle blowing website, Wikileaks, Macau casinos’ “phenomenal success is based on a formula that facilitates… money laundering, upwards of a phenomenal $200 billion per year.”
There is much more in those diplomatic cables on Macau that could also apply to Goa’s casinos – “Facilitator organizations work closely with organized crime groups to identify customers and collect debts. Junket operators work directly with casinos to buy gaming chips at discounted rates, allowing players to avoid identification.”
“Know-your-customer (KYC) and record-keeping requirements are significantly looser than in other international gaming venues. Oversight…is limited and remains a serious weakness.”
“A final comparison between Macau’s dangerously out-of-control casino industry, and Goa’s insidiously growing menace, is the redirection of that pipeline of unregistered black money via the casino tables directly into the political system.” The paper states the case of Sheldon Adelson, “who makes his fortune on the gaming tables in Macau” and is “a would-be political kingmaker in both the USA and Israel.”
The Times of India writer ends his analysis raising several questions about the existence of casinos in Goa.
“Why does Goa have casinos? Why are they bang in the middle of the river opposite Panaji? Why are images of gambling allowed on billboards, and broadcast on the side of a casino right in the centre of the state capital? Why does this extremely dirty, globally reviled, utterly degraded, extraordinarily dubious so-called industry continue to hang on in a state that does not need it, and despite a public consensus against casinos that has only grown, strengthened and redoubled over the past decade? It’s the money, stupid. Just follow the money.” PC
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