Chinese Casino Magnate’s Empire Set to Expand in Laos
The businessman Zhao Wei has established close relationships to Laos’s
communist elite.
Sebastian Strangio, The Diplomat
April 8, 2021
See link
https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/chinese-casino-magnates-empire-set-to-expand-in-laos/
for photo.
A secretive, sanctioned Chinese casino mogul is looking to expand his
economic empire in Laos, unfurling plans to develop tourism projects and
other business ventures in remote corners of the country.
According to a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA)’s Lao service, an
indispensable portal to news from the communist-ruled nation, the
businessman Zhao Wei toured Saravan province in southern Laos and met with
the provincial governor “to discuss the possibility of developing an
airport and investing in several agricultural and tourism development
projects.”
RFA quoted local officials as saying that Zhao visited tracts of land in a
district on the border with Vietnam, along with land surveyors. “They
conducted a survey on a stretch of land near the Lao-Vietnamese border to
plant commercial trees,” one official said.
Zhao Wei is the chairman of the Kings Romans Group, which in 2007 was
granted a 99-year lease over what became known as the Golden Triangle
Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), a gambling and tourism enclave in a remote
pocket of the country’s northwest, close to the point where the borders of
Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand converge.
Before setting up in Laos, Zhao, a businessman from China’s Heilongjiang
province, is known to have once operated casinos in Macao and in Mong La, a
town on the border between China’s Yunnan province and a rebel-controlled
zone in Myanmar that has become notorious as a center for border-hopping
Chinese gamblers.
The GTSEZ, which exists under the de facto sovereignty of Zhao and his
enterprise and is dominated by soaring apartment towers and the giant
golden crown of the Kings Romans Casino, has been similarly set up to
attract tourists from China, where gambling is banned outside Macao.
Kings Romans has also attracted attention for its alleged immersion in a
range of criminal enterprises. In January 2018, the U.S. Treasury
Department imposed sanctions on Zhao and three associates for engaging in
“drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, bribery and
wildlife trafficking, much of which is facilitated through the Kings Romans
Casino.”
The sanctions have apparently done little to stem the expansion of the
GTSEZ, where apartment buildings continue to rise over the Mekong. In
October of last year, Zhao broke ground on the $50 million port development
on a loosely-policed stretch of the Mekong upstream of the GTSEZ. One
expert predicted that the new port “will mostly facilitate commerce, legal
and illicit, of goods from China that will benefit Chinese commercial
interests, legal and illicit, in Laos,” he said.
In addition to the possible new venture in Saravan, the RFA report notes
that Zhao has also put out feelers for a number of other enterprises,
including tourist attractions in Houaphanh province, a former communist
base area in the northwest of Laos, and close to the Plain of Jars, a
UNESCO World Heritage Site in Xieng Khouang province.
Zhao’s rise testifies to China’s expanding economic footprint in Laos, a
by-product of the close economic integration between the two nations, which
over the past two decades has transformed the physical landscape of the
capital Vientiane and the country’s northern provinces. It also
encapsulates the close relationship of Chinese businesspeople, some of
questionable probity, with Laos’s ruling elite.
All of these recent reports suggests that, lubricated by the favor of a
corrupt and permissive party-state, Zhao’s economic empire will continue
its steady expansion into the undeveloped corners of the Lao economy.
https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/chinese-casino-magnates-empire-set-to-expand-in-laos/