The Tribune

WE agree with a statement made by Dioniso D’Aguilar last year that CTFE was an “unsuitable investment for the Bahamas.” In fact, we would go so far as to say that no touristic investment — particularly with casinos attached and having the remotest connection with Macau — should be considered desirable for the Bahamas.

Since making that statement, Mr D’Aguilar, a former board member of Baha Mar, is now Minister of Tourism with the Gaming Board in his portfolio and an approved gaming licence for Baha Mar on his desk.

An application for this licence was presented to Mr Obie Wilchcombe, then Minister of Tourism, from Baha Mar’s prospective buyers, Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE) late last November. It included a list of operators that the Hong Kong based company wanted to employ for the hotel and casino. Mr Wilchcombe announced that the Gaming Board had started its due diligence examination. Bahamians heard nothing more after that except that the company had purchased the required equipment before it had received its licence and was already hiring staff. For Mr D’Aguilar it seemed obvious that the decision of approvals was a foregone conclusion, and that certain persons were just going through the motions to support that conclusion.

On April 5th this year — just seven days before Baha Mar’s “soft opening” – government announced that the resort had received its gaming approvals after “a comprehensive probity investigation.”

Within the past month we received a typed 37-page report, posted from Taiwan, giving a detailed account of the New World Group of companies, and its associates. It is an intricate spider’s web of long friendships investing into each other’s companies - an investigation that would take longer to probe than our gaming investigators seemed to have spent on the job.

It suggests that whoever went to Hong Kong from the Gaming Board to do “a comprehensive probity investigation” probably had an elegant cup of afternoon tea with the late founder, Cheng Yu Tung’s son, Henry, and Henry’s children, Adrian and Sonia, both Harvard graduates, smart and probably fine representatives of a flourishing enterprise. The founder died last September at the age of 91. Maybe our Bahamian team were so impressed by who they met that they returned congratulating themselves on a job ‘well done’. Or maybe they weren’t– could it be remotely possible that these recently exposed handsome bonus payments were authorized to smooth the way? At the very least, the public is entitled to see what their “probative investigation” unearthed.

When word started to spread that CTFE could not get a gaming licence in international jurisdictions, former Tourism Minister Obie Wilchcombe tried to explain it away by likening it to Sir Sol Kerzner not being able to get a gaming licence in the US.

The only problem was that his explanation was not true.

“We were licensed to operate casinos in the USA,” said Sir Sol, “and did in fact operate the resorts international casino in Atlantic City for a couple of years in the late ‘90s as well as the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut and have never been denied a licence anywhere.”

Of course he also had a licence for the casino in Atlantis, Paradise Island.

The probable explanation for the Cheng’s claim that they have never had a gaming application rejected is probably because the application has never been made in their company’s name, the New World Group, but through their investment in STDM, which controls SJM holdings, a major casino company in which they have also invested, and which is headed by Stanley Ho a long-time friend of the late Mr Cheng Yu Tung. Confused? As well you might be, but this is only the beginning in this many tangled web of investments that now create the Cheng’s problems. And so our readers can imagine the depth of the due diligence mystery in which our investigating team from Nassau got completely lost.

Of course their long business association to the Ho family has been of no help. Earlier this year a Macau court released Alan Ho, nephew of former kingpin Stanley Ho, after holding him for 13 months, accused of facilitating a high-profile prostitution ring. Ho, was a “former senior executive at Hotel Lisboa, owned by SJM Holdings, the listed arm of his uncle’s gaming empire.” He was arrested in January last year with five associates.

When the mystery thread is followed one runs into China’s anti-corruption campaign that is trying to stop the outward flow of funds from China through the casino junket industry in Macau – heavily infiltrated by the triad. The Macau government, where gambling is legal, now has to respond to demands from Beijing, where gambling is not legal, and try to diversify away from gaming and into tourism and leisure.

Apparently President Xi Jingping’s corruption crackdown and recent austerity drive has scared off many high rollers. Of course, this will upset the triad’s happy nesting ground, which will be on the lookout for greener pastures. China doesn’t want them, nor does the Bahamas.

We would recommend that the whole background of the Baha Mar casino approval be reinvestigated.

And if found wanting, be reconsidered. Also, all the information still sealed on this case in the court should be unsealed. Bahamians are entitled to know what is going on in their country.

If only the Christie government and its “sovereignty” red herring had not interfered with investor Sarkis Izmirlian invoking Chapter 11 of Delaware’s bankruptcy court, this small country would not now be exposed to an even greater threat to its future.

We’ve endured five long years of secret deals and backroom shenanigans with the Christie administration. That is why they were voted out.

This new government campaigned on the premise of openness and transparency, and they should live up to their promises.

There should be nothing that is kept from the Bahamian people.