Macau’s ‘Junket King’ Alvin Chau receives 18 years jail sentence

Alvin Chau, a Macau gambling kingpin known as ‘Junket King,’ has over 100 charges, including organised crime and illegal gaming, attached to his record, leading to an 18 years jail sentence.

The  48-year-old was found guilty in a case centred on illegal bets exceeding HK$823.7bn (£85.7bn; $105bn). Chau, a high-profile and colourful figure in the local casino industry, had denied the charges. Macau, a former Portuguese colony, is the only Chinese city where gambling is legal.

Chau was the chairman and founder of Suncity Group. It was Macau’s biggest operator of junkets or organised trips for wealthy gamblers to casinos. It arranged for high rollers from mainland China to travel to Macau, gamble in the city’s casinos, and offer them loans. It also collected debts for casinos and operated VIP rooms across Macau’s casinos.

The business owner resigned in December 2021, days after his arrest. Prosecutors had accused Chau of creating and leading a criminal syndicate that had facilitated undeclared bets. They said that as a result, the government lost more than HK$8.26bn in tax income.

The court ruled in favour of the prosecutors for most of the charges but acquitted Chau of money laundering. The high-profile case also involves 20 other defendants. Coronavirus restrictions and a crackdown by the Chinese government on money being moved out of the mainland have hit hard the gambling industry.

In September, a court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou jailed over 30 people for cross-border gambling in connection with Chau’s case. Suncity shut all of its VIP rooms after Chau’s arrest. But even before that, the number of junkets in Macau had been on a constant decline. There are now only 36 junket operators left, down from 100 in 2019, according to official figures.

With his slicked-back hair and tanned skin, Chau is a well-known figure in the Chinese-speaking world, and a favourite among tabloids focused on his love affairs. Local media labelled him ‘Washing Rice Wa” after a sitcom character – though the name can also be seen as a euphemism for money laundering.

BBC/S.O