Kapok | Being ill-equipped

Eric Sautedé

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a freshly arrived European journalist in Hong Kong who had been told that I was closely following current affairs in Macao and, more importantly, that I was willing to discuss certain topics considered by some—too many actually—as taboo. When I asked about the topic she wanted to cover, I was pretty astonished to discover that the issue at hand was the one of “money laundering”: the workings, the amount, the relationship to the casino industry, the regulations and law enforcement policies put in place by the government to combat the situation, and of course the outcome, whether money laundering was still galloping or if it had been reined in.
My initial reaction was one of dismay: how come a newcomer could choose that as a first topic? How can one imagine shedding a corner of novel and bright light—the ethical intention of the investigative newsperson being beyond doubt—on such a sensitive topic without having built a web of connexions over the years that would allow for some form of insider take? And then, with such high stakes, people who are actually in the know will usually keep their lips sealed, and thus the only ones talking are the ignorants or the bragging fools. I was thus pretty dismissive. And then…
If “everybody” knows money laundering happens on a vast scale in the gambling Mecca of the East, one would be hard pressed to come up with reliable and up-to-date amounts. Numbers in that respect go beyond the imagination of a normally equipped human brain: when a single junket employee can disappear with US$1.3 billion of creditors money, as it happened with Huang Shan back in April 2014, it is not impossible to conceive that the money involved in dubious dealings must be somehow proportionate to this incredible extension of credit by junket operators that goes completely unmonitored by the gaming regulator. And this is one—a big one, and clearly the biggest one that ever came to the attention of the public—of many.
In English, an inquisitive mind often stumbles on the US$200 billion roundish amount of yearly money laundering in Macao. This impressive figure derives from the 2013 annual report of the US Congressional Executive Commission on China, in which one can read that “[t]he gambling industry in Macao is reportedly tied to widespread corruption and the laundering of large amounts of money out of mainland China. […] One Macao academic estimates that US$202 billion in ill-gotten funds are channeled through Macao each year.”
If one looks at the source, the Macao academic is none other than Camoes Tam Chi Keung, from MUST, a well-known liberal personality in Macao specialising in journalism and communication, who had confided to a journalist from the Hong Kong-based Oriental Daily that money laundering could be estimated between 1.57 billion yuan a year, on the conservative side (the figure quoted in the US report) and as much as 10 trillion yuan per year—a staggering and far less conservative US$1,250 billion! As far as methodology is concerned, no question was asked.
Now, if one checks on Wisers how many stories have appeared in the Chinese press regarding “black money laundering” 洗黑錢 in Macao in the past six months, a meagre 144 articles are returned, and even the tightening of monitoring measures by the DICJ in May-June 2016—we finally got rid of aliases for junket stakeholders!—gets only a passing mention. An equivalent search for Hong Kong comes up with 957 stories: should we conclude that logistics, finance and tourism are far more prone to money laundering than gaming?
For Prosecutor General Ip Son Sang, who publicly reported recently that out of 364 cases of money laundering opened in Macao over the past two years only 2 were successfully prosecuted, the problem lies in the lack of proper legal tools. I would add: lack of proper reporting takes a toll too!