Thwarted in his desire to open a resort casino in his home country of Malaysia, whose government is looking to crack down on widespread illegal gambling, tycoon Vincent Tan is spreading his wings into South Korea and Japan.
The founder and head of the Berjaya conglomerate is seeking partners for casinos he wants to develop on South Korea’s popular tourist island of Jeju, where Berjaya broke ground last year on an expansive mixed-use leisure complex, and on Japan’s Okinawa island, where the company owns 100 acres of land.
Reports are he may pursue a public listing in Singapore to fund the projects separately from the parent company’s resources.
The Jeju resort, Gotjawal Village, is joint venture between Berjaya Land and Jeju Free International City Development Centre, a quasi-commercial subsidiary of South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs. The project is not yet licensed for a casino, and the island’s new governor, Won Hee-ryong, is wary of allowing any more — the island, a top destination for tourists from China, is home to eight casinos already, and Genting Singapore is partnering with Chinese interests on plans for a ninth.
As it stands, though, Gotjawal is the island’s largest mixed-use development to date, priced at US$2.4 billion at full build-out, with plans that include luxury beachfront hotels and private residences, a medical center, a retail mall and entertainment and sports venues.
Mr Tan has wanted for years to develop a casino complex on a similar scale in Malaysia to compete with Kuala Lumpur-based Genting Group’s Resorts World Genting just north of the capital city. Plans unveiled last year centered on the company’s 18-acre Berjaya Hills resort in Johor on the border with Singapore. Berjaya Hills is licensed to operate machine games, but Mr Tan envisioned a $930 million casino and hotel targeting middle- and upper-income gamblers from the region currently patronizing Resorts World and Singapore’s two IRs. The plan collapsed in the face of local government opposition.
Berjaya’s far-flung holdings, which include Malaysia’s TOTO sports lottery, range from shopping malls, property development and hotel management to landfills and environmental services. Mr Tan also holds a majority stake in Welsh football club Cardiff City and plans to invest in a US Major League Soccer club in Los Angeles.
Malaysian Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail, in the meantime, has announced that his office is drafting revisions to laws governing online gambling as part of a new push to rein in a thriving underground industry estimated to be generating more than US$1 billion in annual profits from thousands of e-casinos and betting operations nationwide.
Police routinely raid such venues and seize equipment and cash, but Mr Gani Patail has said they’ve been largely ineffective in the absence of a more comprehensive framework of laws and regulations specifically targeting cyber-betting.
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