Rear Window | Iceberg

Severo Portela

In the aftermath of the so-called Dore heist, the Secretary for Economy and Finance and the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau imposed stricter accounting rules on junket operators in a bid to improve transparency and prevent VIP room related theft. Allegedly, Dore managers had stolen and siphoned HK$2 billion, roughly US$258million, from Wynn Macau.
Naturally, the industry was more than eager to buy and sell the narrative of this as a singular event, in spite of the rumors of multiple episodes of financial trouble all along the food chain – the nature of the squeeze on the casino business could not but result in multiple stings. 2015 came to a close in style with the public slapping of VIP gambling operator Kwok Wing Shun, aka “Shanghai Boy”, allegedly for bad debt. Shanghai Boy was having his tea at tea time… in The Peninsula.
The problem seems to be that to strictly regulate the junket business it will be necessary to go to depths where even junkets fear to tread. Just take the alleged Dore copycat early in 2016 – L´Arc SJM Casino -where VIP room operators allegedly pocketed HK 100 million.
Information on this embezzlement is not abundant, yet, but it seems to involve a Chan Yan Hung and 10 VIP rooms. Indeed, it is not the amount involved that makes L´Arc coup deserve our attention, but the fact that the SJM managing director, and its major individual shareholder, Angela Leong, quoted by Portuguese daily Hoje Macau, claims to not know the operations and financial dealings between the casino and the VIP room operators, aka junkets, all that well. That is how astray the junket universe has gone!
If information is scarce, commentary is rare. But legislator Zheng Anting, who has been a kind of shadow watch on anything related to the industry, offered a serious warning: this is the tip of the iceberg. Zheng could not quantify his concern, and it is not quantifiable, but we can introduce here as a light note on the opaque world of junket finances a reasonable hypothetical. Just consider that only one-tenth of the volume of the iceberg, no matter its size, is standing above the water!
2015 gaming volume sank about one third compared with the previous year to a still galactic 30 billion, as reported by Kate O`Keefe – a WSJ journalist no longer based in Hong Kong – “roiled by China´s crackdown on corruption and capital flight”.   Of course, the trend came to stay, and as Lionel Leong is saying once again; the industry needs to be aware it has to keep on adjusting, adjusting. Those who dream of a softening of the financial grip on Macau are just…dreaming.
Finally, we have to worry about the fate of the five missing editors of the Mighty Current publishing house and bookstore in Causeway Bay. Unsettling it is, to say the least. Since we are talking about five from the book industry, why not dedicate to them a Kafka quote from his notebooks: The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary.
We hope Lee Bo and the others can find their way back to Hong Kong, and who knows, they can write a book on Regina Ip and her amazing theory on the porous border, fishing and smuggling. We can do the laughing part.