The family that took legal action to suppress a report into Star’s suitability to hold a casino licence has a long history of escaping scrutiny.
As octogenarian jewellery tycoon Cheng Yu-Tung lay comatose, regulators from Queensland’s Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing dithered in the wings.
It was 2015, and nobody could have guessed that by the time the Brisbane casino opened – last week – the hushed money laundering then underpinning the nation’s casinos would be exposed and foiled by new regulations and that Star Entertainment would be on the verge of bankruptcy, dragged down in part by the cost of this very project.
Founded as a single jewellery store in 1929, it had expanded to become the largest jewellery retailer in the world, and diversified into property development, hotels, ports and casinos. It could also lay claim to having bested Donald Trump in a business deal – and perhaps played a bit role in his ascension to the White House – when it bailed him out of a development on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1994.
It was in Macau that he met Ho, a refugee from Hong Kong who survived by running smuggling trips up the Pearl River Delta before, in 1961, securing the monopoly licence for the province’s casinos. CYT bought into the consortium that held the licence in 1982. The VIP rooms were operated by third parties, which became an avenue for triads to enter the casinos and engage in racketeering, loan sharking and money laundering, the report said.
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