Inside Asian Gaming

December 2009 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 45 Briefs and hotel joint venture between Dr Stanley Ho’s SJM Holdings and Success Universe Group Ltd (formerly Macau Success). The glove will be displayed next year in a specially constructed gallery located in the lobby of Ponte 16. Also on display will be other Jackson memorabilia items including a signed drawing of Charlie Chaplin, a pair of acrylic tube socks, Jackson’s ‘zombie’ shirt which he wore in the video of ‘Thriller’ and a platinum record awarded for the album Bad . Local poll blow for Taiwan casinos scheme Plans for oneormore casino resorts on Taiwan’s outlying islands appear to be further away than ever. The reason is a sharp drop in voter support for the pro-casino ruling KMT Nationalist Party in recent local elections. President Ma Ying-jeou, a proponent of closer ties with China as well as of the gaming project, has ordered a review of local poll results that saw his personal approval ratings also fall. Popular opinion on casinos is divided in Taiwan, and President Ma may well be tempted to avoid pushing through a policy that could lose him even more votes in swing constituencies in the next scheduled general election in 2012. The waters are further muddied because the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is expected to fight the 2012 poll on a platform supporting formal independence from Mainland China—something that’s never happened before, despite 60 years of political separation. The DPP is also much more lukewarm on legalising gaming than the KMT. But even if the DPP did support the casino scheme, declaring unilateral independence is likely to bring a new freeze in relations with Beijing and kill off the potential feeder market for the gaming resorts. The window of opportunity for the casino scheme was probably in the first two years of President Ma’s administration, when his popular mandate and parliamentary majority seemed unassailable. But two unsuccessful plebiscites in the frontrunner location Penghu (one poll with insufficient voter turnout and the other an outright voter rejection of the idea) have lost valuable time. Kinmen, only a few kilometres from the Mainland, seems much more keen to get involved, but may not now get the chance. ‘Privatisation’ hint for PAGCOR Reports fromthe Philippines suggest both the leading candidates in next spring’s presidential elections favour privatising PAGCOR, the country’s gaming regulator-cum-operator. What practical difference that would make to the organisation of the country’s gaming industry is unclear at this stage. In many countries, the movement of an organisation from public ownership to the private sector is often seen as an opportunity to introduce market discipline to a bureaucratic or otherwise inefficient or corrupt body. The challenge in the case of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation, to give it its full name, is that as a revenue raiser in its own right and a potential source of patronage, it carries considerable political clout within the country’s governmental system. PAGCOR is said to be the only public body reporting directly to the Office of the President. The temptation for any presidential candidate, therefore, would be to announce the ‘privatisation’ of PAGCOR and then simply hand control of the body over to political cronies who would act as ‘shareholders’. Under those circumstances, the advantage of privatisation would reside not in greater organisational efficiencies or greater transparency of operation serving the public interest, but in the ability of PAGCOR or any successor organisation to avoid scrutiny of its business affairs by the country’s elected politicians and the public accounts watchdog, the Commission on Audit, under the guise of ‘commercial confidentiality’. CoD installs high tech signs from Gaming Support Netherlands-basedGaming Support has completed a resort-wide installation of its JackpotJunction XL/CastNET digital sign system at City of Dreams (CoD) in Macau. Completion of the project was timed to coincide with the opening of Grand Hyatt Macau at CoD, an integrated gaming resort developed by Nasdaq-listed Melco Crown Entertainment Limited. Gaming Support describes JackpotJunction XL/CastNET as a ‘modular, server-based’ sign system. “We are extremely proud to have successfully installed the JackpotJunction XL/CastNET digital signage system throughout such a landmark resort as City of Dreams,”stated Nick Hogan, Gaming Support’s Vice President of Sales and Business Development. President Ma Ying-jeou City of Dreams