The case involving the former chairman of Suncity Group, Alvin Chau, continued in Macau’s Court of First Instance on Monday with the court summoning the director of the DICJ’s Compliance Audit Division, Ms Wong Long Peng, to testify.
On the stand, Wong said she never came across any information that indicated Suncity was involved in “betting under the table” or online betting when examining the financial statements submitted by the company each month.
According to the law, Wong explained, gaming agents are required to submit a monthly financial statement to the gaming regulator DICJ, which includes the month’s expenses, revenue and rolling chip turnover. The DICJ will then compare the statements with information provided on the concessionaire’s agent commission form to determine whether there are any discrepancies with the agent’s funds.
Wong said, from the information in the statements, there were no major issues found regarding the capital of Suncity’s agents.
“The financial statements provided by Suncity were not very different from the commission information provided by the concessionaires,” she said.
The prosecutor asked Wong if she saw any intentional concealment of information during the DICJ’s random checks of the Suncity System. She replied, “When the DICJ conducts random checks of VIP rooms, they will ask the casino’s cashier staff to open the system for the DICJ to check, but the DICJ staff will not log into the system of the intermediaries themselves, so no hidden information was found.”
In the case, Chau and other former Suncity staff are accused of using “betting under the table” – a practice where VIP players reach an arrangement with junket operators to place much larger bets on each hand than what is represented by the chips on the table – to defraud the Macau government and the concessionaires, thereby costing them at least MOP$8.26 billion in GGR.
The Compliance Audit Division also assisted the Judicial Police (PJ) in calculating the amount of the government’s losses.
Wong said the DICJ was asked by the PJ to assist them in calculating the lost GGR, but the amount calculated by the DICJ was based on numbers provided by the PJ without checking whether the information provided was true.
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