Inside Asian Gaming

Savills Vietnam; Marco Polo Hotels; PricewaterhouseCoopers; and Deloitte Global Services. What she lacked, the source said, was a workable plan. She spent money on the look and feel of success, but did not have a way to attract significant capital or make sensible investments. Mostly the company held parties and tried to create a buzz. One story is as instructive as it is amusing. At one point in the company’s development, a professional contracted by the firm was asked to attend a party celebrating a new joint venture. It was a big, extravagant affair with hundreds of guests. When the professional asked Ms Thao who was being honored, she responded: “you”. “She didn’t have a business plan,” the source said. “What she became very good at doing was throwing big parties. Nothing more.” And it is not clear she was good at that either. Images of the parties featured on the HappyLand website resemble a series of staged photo ops. Consider the following pictures, captioned, respectively, “The special and distinguished performance” and “The party took place very happily and warmly.” In the centre of the second picture stands Joe Jackson beside Ms Thao. The finished product, at least as it has been envisioned, is a strange mishmash of Disney, Hollywood and Las Vegas. You get a Maoist-looking boardwalk, creepy cartoon figures, a mock-Gothic suspension bridge and ‘Winery Villa’ that’s such a collision of competing styles it’s hard to know where to begin. Judging from construction progress photos on the Khang Thong Group website, http://www.khangthong.vn , and the ThemeParkGuy website, http://www.thethemeparkguy.com/board/happyland- vietnam/ , there is still a long way to go to realizing that vision. The images suggest the Ghost Cities of China: low-grade construction