China slaps 18-year prison sentence on Macau’s ‘Junket King’
Alvin Chau, the 48-year-old former chair of Suncity Group, has been found guilty in a case centered around hundreds of billions worth of illegal bets. His high-profile case is the latest move in Beijing’s crackdown on Macau’s once-lucrative gambling industry.
Macau’s “Junket King” Alvin Chau (周焯华 Zhōu Zhuōhuá) has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, closing the book on the spectacular demise of one of the most high-profile gambling figures in the city.
Chau, the 48-year-old former chair of Suncity Group, the Chinese gambling hub’s biggest junket operator, was found guilty of criminal association, fraud, and illegal bets exceeding $105 billion. He was one of 20 others named in the case.
- Chau was arrested in November 2021 for allegedly running an illicit cross-border gambling and money-laundering syndicate, a move which sent shivers down the spine of Macau’s once-thriving casino industry.
- The flamboyant, slicked-back gambling tycoon resigned from his position just a few days after his arrest, which had wiped around 50% of Suncity’s listed shares.
- He is often called “Junket King” in English, and “Casino King” in Chinese (赌厅之王 dǔtīng zhī wáng). But he is also widely known in Cantonese as “Wash Rice Wa” (洗米华 xǐmǐ huá) — a nod to a 1980s Cantonese sitcom character who shares one of the characters in his name, but also works as a tongue-in-check euphemism for money laundering.
Junket companies like Suncity act as the middle-man between casino operators and wealthy high-rollers. Companies organize all-expense-paid gambling trips for VIP clients that can include perks such as providing credit to fund their bets, or collecting their debts.
- Suncity was at one point estimated to control between 40% to 45% of the junket market, raking in the benefits of operating in the only Chinese city where gambling is legal.
- Wealthy Chinese citizens also use these junkets as a way to move money out of the country — some of their gambling “expenses” are paid in yuan but returned to them in the form of foreign currency.
The hefty prison sentence is China’s latest move to rein in the gambling capital of Asia. In recent years, Beijing has cracked down on junket operators that cater to its heavy-spending gamblers, in a bid to stop the outflow of billions of dollars from mainland China to overseas.
- Police arrested Chan Weng Lin (陳榮煉 Chén Róngliàn), the CEO of both casino resort Macau Legend and of Macau’s second-largest junket operator Tak Chun Group, in January 2022.
- While junket operators played a leading role in Macau’s gambling sector before the pandemic — to a point where it even surpassed Las Vegas in gaming revenues — their numbers have been on a continuous decline.
- There are now only 36 junket operators left, down from 100 in 2019, according to official figures.
