China’s Wenzhou orders arrest of Chau Macau junket tycoon Reuters By Reuters

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Wenzhou has ordered the arrest of an eastern Chinese city for Macau junket tycoon Alvin Chau on charges of engaging in gambling activities in mainland China.

Chau is the founder of Macau’s largest junket operator, Suncity, which manages VIP gaming rooms across Asia. Junket operators are the means by which they carry high rollers to play in casinos, extending credit and collecting debts.

Casino games are illegal in China, outside the special administrative region of Macau, the largest gaming site in the world.

An investigation found that Chauk had set up a network of agents on the mainland to engage citizens in both overseas and cross-border gambling activities, the Wenzhou City Public Security Bureau said on Friday.

Chau also set up an asset management company on the mainland to help bettors make cross-border fund transfers, a coastal city official in Zhejiang province, Weibo (NASDAQ :), said.

Chau and Suncity were unable to put in the phone to comment, and did not immediately respond to requests for comments via email.

GGRAsia, news about the Asian casino industry, said a Suncity spokesman said in an email Saturday morning that the company had contacted Chau and had not received a response.

The company noted that “it is monitoring the relevant issues. The company emphasizes that all businesses are normally in accordance with the law and under the supervision of the Government of the Macao Special Administration.”

Suncity’s publicly traded entity in Hong Kong, Suncity Group Holdings Ltd, does not include its junket operations.

The Wenzhou official said in July 2020 that the Chauk-led “crime syndicate” had 199 shareholder-level agents, more than 12,000 gambling agents and more than 80,000 members.

“The amount of money involved was extraordinarily high, seriously damaging the order of social management in our country,” the security office said. “The security authorities (Chau) urge him to surrender as soon as possible in order to receive a light treatment.”

Jeremy Douglas, a representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, told Reuters: “Chau’s arrest warrant certainly sends shock waves through organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau, but also in Cambodia. Also in Laos and the Philippines.

Douglas said Suncity has been associated with major drug traffickers and money laundering for many years.

Chauk has grown Suncity from exploiting a high roller table Wynn Macau (OTC:) ‘s casino in 2007, with a large conglomerate with thousands of employees and businesses ranging from property and cars.

In 2019, Suncity was named https://www.reuters.com/article/china-casinos-idINL4N24A13F by state-sponsored Chinese media outlets that attacked online gambling for causing what it described as a major detriment to China’s social economic order. Suncity said he did not use online gaming then.