The Macau gaming regulator had “not found any irregularities” during its past regular checks on the finances of the now-defunct junket operator Suncity Group, the Court of First Instance heard on Monday (Yesterday).
But Wong Long Peng, Head of the Division of Compliance and Audit of the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, also known by its Portuguese acronym DICJ, emphasised that their checks were mainly carried out based on the information provided by Suncity and the city’s six gaming concessionaires and sub-concessionaires.
The local court is now hearing the high-profile case of Alvin Chau Cheok Wa, former boss of Suncity, and 20 other defendants, who are indicted for involvement in illicit gambling activities, running a criminal syndicate, fraud, and money laundering.
At the heart of this trial, the prosecution accused the criminal syndicate headed by Mr Chau of running under-the-table betting business that caused the Macau SAR government a loss of HK$8.2 billion (US$1 billion) in gaming tax revenue between March 2013 and March 2021, as well as losses for the city’s gaming operators.
Under-the-table bets, or also known as side bets or multipliers, mean a bet formally denominated at a casino gambling table representing only a fraction of the amount of a private bet made between gamblers and junkets to avoid gaming revenue levies.
In the Monday hearing, Ms Wong talked about how the gaming watchdog supervises local junket operators, for instance, DICJ specifically requests the junkets to submit monthly financial statements for review. In addition, the watchdog also undertakes on-site inspections on the cages of the VIP rooms run by the junket operators, she added.
Upon cross-checking the monthly financial statements of Suncity and the balance sheets of the six gaming operators for commissions they paid to the junket, the witness said the watchdog had found “no major discrepancies” between these two sets of documents.
“We hadn’t seen any irregularities in the financial statements [of Suncity],” Ms Wong said, adding the Suncity balance sheets made no mention of under-the-table bets, telephone betting or online betting.
Prosecutor Lai U Hou stated in the hearing on Monday that the now-defunct junket operator would withhold information about under-the-table bets, phone betting and online betting prior to DICJ inspections.
In response, Ms Wong said she didn’t know whether Suncity had hidden certain information. “There were no third parties for us to verify all the information [Suncity] provided. We could only review the information it allowed us to see,” she illustrated.
