United Nations Celebrates Alvin Chau Arrest, Analysts Say Bad for Future Junkets

Alvin Chua is innocuous until proven shamed of the illegal cross-border gambling charges he’s cladding in China. But the United Nations says his hitch is nonetheless a positive development.

Chua, the Chinese billionaire who amassed his lot through his founding of the Suncity Group, is being held by authorities in Macau. Local officials in that location say an investigating into his businesses’ trading operations is ongoing. The metropolis of Wenzhou is seeking Chau’s extradition to the Zhejiang Province. He will face charges of illegally running online casinos and play excursions to Macau.

Macau’s VIP junkets get long been accused of potentially facilitating the laundering of money for mainland China’s richest people. The UN says Chau’s stay should be a major wake-up call off for the junket industry.

Chau’s stop stock-purchase warrant is no uncertainty sending shockwaves through organised offence inwards Hong Kong and Macau, but also Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines,” said Jeremy Douglas, the Regional Representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for southeastern United States Asia and the Pacific.

The UNODC’s briny focussing is the trafficking and revilement of illicit drugs, as easily as exposing criminal syndicates, international terrorism, and political corruption.

Arrest Further Damages Junkets

In his release, Stephen A. Douglas added that Suncity has been linked to major drug traffickers and money laundering networks for many years. Alvin Chau’s arrest only if adds negativity to junket systems throughout Asia that already don’t make needfully glowing reputations.

Gaming analysts at JPMorgan who are focused on Macau and other Asiatic gambling casino markets say Chau’s detention presents a sober time to come for VIP promoters inwards the Chinese enclave.

What’s the impact? Really tough for the junket/VIP industry,” JPMorgan analysts DS Kim, Amanda Cheng, and Titus Livius Lyu noted. “It goes without locution that Mr. Chau is arguably the biggest — and certainly most famous — fig inward the junket industry, as the founder/CEO of the undisputed biggest junket inward the world, Suncity, which accounted for 40 percent to 45 percent of the junket market.”

The Asian gaming specialists say Chau’s arrest, despite him maintaining that he nor Suncity feature engaged inward any illegal operations, will potential scare other junket operators.

“The fact that regular he tin can live arrested for just running the junket — what seems to us ilk very normal junket activities — should send out a gelidity land the pricker of any and all junkets,” the JPMorgan remark added.

VIP Numbers

The JPMorgan analysts say Chau’s stoppage is a wake-up telephone call for junkets, but won’t necessarily feature a disconfirming long-term wallop on Macau casinos. However, gaming numbers in the neighborhood are relieve to a great extent propped upwardly by junkets.

According to the Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, VIP junket rooms accounted for just about 40 percent of the region’s porcine gaming revenue (GGR) inward pre-pandemic 2019.

Macau’s hexad licensed cassino operators collectively generated roughly $36.4 one million million that year. That way junket rooms won around $14.6 billion from their high-end clientele.