In Cambodia, Cyber Casinos Fall Into a Legal Gray Area
In 2010, the Ha Tien Vegas Entertainment Resort, a casino investment on Kampot province’s border with Vietnam that included luxury karaoke rooms and suites, launched with high hopes of attracting Vietnamese gamblers. At the end of December, Ha Tien Vegas closed down. To the north, in Savannakhet on the Lao border with Thailand, another casino, the Savan Vegas Hotel and Entertainment Complex, is doing better business. Following the prevailing winds in the gaming industry, two U.S. gambling magnates with business interests in Phnom Penh have been linked to both casinos through online, virtual gambling. Via video link-up, online gamers, playing in English, Thai or Mandarin, can gamble on live tables with Lao and foreign croupiers at the Savan Vegas casino. ... Cash to gamble in the games can be deposited directly into bank accounts held by the website operators—including one of their accounts at Cambodia’s largest bank, Acleda—or online through payment services Moneybookers or Neteller. ... The Savan Vegas casino is operated by Macau-based Sanum Investments, but the company that offers the online gaming experience is Creative Entertainment Ltd., which has an office on Phnom Penh’s Chroy Changva peninsula, and provides access to virtual casinos through the domains clubvegas999.com and savanvegas999.com. Their websites display a license issued in the Dutch dependency of Curacao, a small island in the Caribbean that offers licenses to online gaming operations. ... Regulators worldwide are coming to terms with the highly profitable world of online gambling, which operates across jurisdictions and poses questions over licensing, taxation and enforcement of local laws—including laws in Cambodia. For its part, Cambodia is yet to pass any regulations on online gaming. Officials at the small department within the Finance Ministry that deals with casino licensing said they were unable to say whether it was legal or not. ... In the past, Cambodian authorities have quickly shut down online gambling operations. Most recently, 114 Indonesians were deported in September, 2012, after authorities found they were running what police called an “illegal” football betting website from a villa in Phnom Penh’s Chamkar Mon district. It is unclear whether Creative Entertainment’s license in Curacao is enough to satisfy authorities in Cambodia. Creative Entertainment counsel Marc Borg wrote on June 26 that a statement posted on the website of clubvegas999.com, which stated, “We are registered and licensed by the Kingdom of Cambodia for Casino operations including online,” ... Currently, online gaming is “the elephant in the room” in any discussion of the future of the casino industry, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in a 2012 report titled, “Global Gaming Outlook: the casino and online gaming market to 2015.” “Online gaming is happening across the world, whether regional, national, and state regulators and lawmakers like it or not,” the report says. “The fog of uncertainty that surrounds the size, scope, and often the legal basis of online gaming makes it hard to assess its current and future impacts, or to plan strategies around it.” The PwC report found that regulation of online gaming “varies widely between countries” and different forms of gaming are also differently regulated. “These uncertainties are partly due to the fact that much of the applicable legislation predates the Internet, so its application to online services is inevitably open to debate and challenge,” the report states. But regulators, in Cambodia too, are learning to catch up. Ros Phearun, deputy director of the finance industry department inside the Ministry of Economy and Finance, said the government was looking into the legality of Creative Entertainment’s business. Online casino websites are illegal in Cambodia, Mr. Phearun said. ...
