Alvin Chau, the gambling king of China imprisoned for 18 years
Key takeaways:
- Alvin Chau was a celeb before his detention in 2021.
- Macau gambling heavyweight Alvin Chau has been condemned to 18 years in prison for more than 100 charges, including scheduled crime and illicit gaming.
The 48-year-old was found culpable in a case that centred on illicit bets surpassing HK$823.7bn (£85.7bn; $105bn).
Chau, a high-profile and colourful name in the local casino industry, had refused the charges.
Macau, an ex-Portuguese colony, is the only Chinese city where gambling is permitted.
Alvin Chau arrested for gambling:
Chau was the chairman and creator of Suncity Group. It was Macau’s most significant operator of junkets or organised trips for rich gamblers to casinos.
It arranged for an increased number of rollers from mainland China to go to Macau and gamble in the city’s casinos and presented loans to them. It even collected debts for casinos and used VIP rooms across Macau’s casinos.
The businessman, nicknamed “Junket King”, resigned in December 2021, days after his detention.
Prosecutors charged Chau with making and leading an illegal syndicate that had eased undeclared bets. They said that as a result, the country lost more than HK$8.26bn in tax revenue.
The court ruled in turn of the prosecutors for most of the charges but forgave Chau of money laundering. The high-profile issue also concerns 20 other defendants.
The gambling industry has been struck hard by covid restrictions and a crackdown by the Chinese government on funds being moved out of the mainland.
In September, a court in the eastern Chinese metropolis of Wenzhou imprisoned almost 30 people for cross-border gambling about Chau’s case.
Suncity closed all of its VIP rooms after Chau’s detention. But also before that, the number of junkets in Macau had been on a steady decline. There are now just 36 junket operators left, down from 100 in 2019, according to official numbers.
