Illustration by Andrea Ucini

By Chris Horton
May 24, 2020

How Chinese gamblers turned a Cambodian casino called NagaWorld into an international juggernaut.

It’s Thursday night at the casino complex NagaWorld, and no one is dancing to the Filipino cover band’s synth-heavy version of Madonna’s “Borderline.” Instead, patrons of the Darlin Darlin Bar, mostly young men, are playing dice games to expedite their imbibing as young waitresses in single-shoulder red gowns shuttle between the bartenders and the tables. At the rear of the bar, a wall of young women in miniskirts chat with each other or look at their phones, waiting for the men to invite them over for a drink.

Although little known outside of Phnom Penh, NagaWorld is one of the gambling world’s biggest money-making machines. In 2018, it raked in more than $500 million in profits, propelling a casino in what not long ago was one of the world’s most impoverished countries into the ranks of Asia’s elite gambling emporiums: Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, Macau’s Wynn Palace and the Resorts World Genting in Malaysia.

But in the case of Cambodia, this arrangement is even more striking because the Chinese government seems determined to profit from the traffic it sends to Cambodia and its gambling halls. How? The state-owned China International Travel Service (CITS) leases planes from NagaCorp in order to provide direct charter flights to Phnom Penh from the Chinese cities of Xi’an, Hangzhou, Qingdao and Changsha. A CITS subsidiary, China Duty Free Group, has built an underground duty-free mall connecting the two Naga complexes in Phnom Penh. And China Metallurgical Corporation, a state owned enterprise, has bid to be one of the subcontractors on Naga3, a new $3.5 billion development that is scheduled to open in 2025.

The story of NagaWorld is the stuff of emerging market legend. In 1993, a new government was formed in Cambodia after the United Nations finished its two-year administration of the country, a move deemed necessary after the horrors of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979, as well as the Vietnamese invasion and occupation that followed. The new government offered a tender for a casino license that would give its winner a monopoly on casino gaming in the capital city of Phnom Penh, and within a 200 kilometer radius of the city, for 40 years.

That same year, NagaCorp’s application to list on Singapore’s stock exchange was rejected. Cambodia, and Chen’s operation, were seen as too far removed from international norms for security and anti-money laundering efforts, according to analysts. So Chen enlisted an American, Tim McNally, to help bring credibility to NagaWorld.

NagaCorp has made it clear for years that it is aligned with Cambodian leadership. Since 2001, Chen, the founder of NagaCorp, has been an advisor to HE, one of the world’s longest serving heads of state. In addition to moving Cambodia closer to Beijing, Hun’s increasingly authoritarian actions have alienated the West, which criticized his landslide election victory in 2018.

NagaWorld’s parent company is now seeking riches beyond Cambodia. The company has broken ground on a new, $300 million casino development in Vladivostok, Russia, a port city in the northeast edge of China, near North Korea.

full https://www.thewirechina.com/2020/05/24 ... a-jackpot/

I thought a lot of casinos closed in Cambodia when online gambling was made illegal around December. Is that not the case?