The end of China’s Zero Covid policy and new concessions for Macau’s incumbents don’t signal the end of its problems. The once and future top global casino destination faces a Beijing regime that’s skeptical, if not downright hostile, toward gambling. Switching Macau betting to mainland China’s currency, the renminbi, might help assuage concerns over funds illegally leaving the mainland via casinos.
Even in extremely challenging times, Macau got seven bidders for its six casino concessions. Unfortunately, authorities didn’t use their leverage wisely to clean up a glaring conflict of interest and remove an underpeforming licensee.
Promised casino operator non-gaming investment will be most effective if targeted toward comprehensive efforts among all stakeholders to boost Macau’s destination appeal. But absent a government mandate, don’t bet on that happening.
Batumi, the Vegas of the Black Sea in Georgia, has 11 casinos, an attractive seaside plaza and big ambitions. (Photo credit: Muhammad Cohen)
As Asian gaming remains muted with its post-Covid prospects murky, the time seems ripe for integrated resorts in Europe. Hard Rock International, Melco Resorts and Cordish are developing IRs a decade after Sheldon Adelson proposed creating EuroVegas in Spain with multiple resorts, casinos, golf courses and thousands of hotel rooms.
VIP room in Casino International at the Batumi Hilton. (Photo provided by Casino International)
Europe already has hundreds of casinos, most catering to local markets, along with a handful of gaming destinations with wider reach. Batumi, Georgia’s Black Sea Vegas, drawing customers from neighboring Turkey and the Middle East, has attractive casinos in international branded hotels, dramatic surroundings, great food and wine, plus expansion ambitions.
The world’s most admired casino resort, seen from Gardens by the Bay. (Credit: Marina Bay Sands)
As Macau continues to struggle under the zero-Covid regime, Singapore icon Marina Bay Sands keeps driving Las Vegas Sands’ financial performance. In an exclusive interview, MBS chief operating officer Paul Town explains how the common interests and shared purpose of the resort and its Singapore host community key the integrated resort’s lasting success.
Osman Yousefzada speaking at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. (Photo credit:Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2022)
“Reformed fashion designer” Osman Yousefzada writes about growing up in a Pakistani-Afghan family in Birmingham, England, in The Go-Between. “It’s not the typical immigrant story of having a business degree and becoming a taxi driver,” he explained at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. “My story is completely different.”
Yousefzada’s parents weren’t literate in any language and lived according to ancestral ultra conservative Muslim traditions. His sisters were taken out of school at age 10, and his mother hardly ever left the house, where she ran a small dressmaking business, grounding Yousefzada’s career in fashion. As he approached puberty, he was increasingly shut off from women in their community beyond his immediate family, “removing the color from my life.” His family’s community didn’t like his book: “They didn’t want to show themselves.”
Margaret Thatcher’s bare knuckle capitalism attacked Birmingham’s unionized industrial base and, with it, Yousefzada’s father’s livelihood. “What Thatcherism took away, the petrodollar and religiosity replaced,” Yousefzada says. “When my father came to the UK in the 1970s, he looked suave, a sort of Cary Grant. Then he changed his appearance.”
With manufacturing virtually extinct in the UK, fashion production now resides in places like Bangladesh. Yousefzada traveled there and recorded garment workers’ views of customers buying the clothing they produce. “They believed their customers ate only fruit,” and wore clothes two or three times then threw them away. Rather than the Western mythology that anybody can become president or millionaires, a seamstress told Yousefzada, “I can only dream as much as I can afford.”
Now more focused on visual and performance art, Yousefzada approached fashion as an exercise in anthropology “about costume and space.” Making space for one’s self is a recurring theme with Yousefzada. “There’s a tug of war with myself: what do I want to call myself. I’ve settled as artist and writer.” Based on his Ubud events and The Go-Between, that seems to be a good fit.
Born in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival return live to foster cultural exchange and boost recovery of tourism on the Indonesian island after more than two years of Covid crimped international travel.
With more than 200 speakers from 19 countries, this 19th edition of the festival runs October 27-30 in Bali. This year’s theme is the Javanese concept Memayu Hayuning Bawana, Uniting Humanity.
“I am proud to announce that the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival returns with an exciting on-the-ground program,” festival founder and director Janet DeNeefe announced at a press conference.
“We will explore the power of storytelling and the role of the written word to uphold humanity’s values and freedoms. With the world becoming more fractured, our lives more disturbed, we will ask: how can we unite the many strands of different cultures and perspectives to create, deeper understanding, mutual respect, and equality?”
Balinese novelist and poet Putu Oka Sukanto, whose work examines Indonesia’s authoritarian past, has received the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “This award strengthens my determination to write and work for those that are left out and those that are marginalized by power,” Sukanto said in thanking the festival for the award.
Puteri Indonesia (Miss Universe Indonesia) 2022 Laksmi DeNeefe Suardana will bring her advocacy for literacy to the program. Daughter of the festival founder, Suardana said, “I’ve been with the festival since the beginning, and it has had a huge impact on me. I want to provide equal opportunities for Indonesian children.”
The festival is an annual highlight of the Bali calendar. As a fan and multiyear participant, I congratulate DeNeefe and her team for weathering Covid, and hope the festival continues to thrive as a forum for ideas and dialogue.
Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson and wife Dr Miriam Adelson (center) at the April 2012 opening of Sands Cotai Central in Macau, with then Macau Chief Executive Fernando Chui Sai-on (left) and then Las Vegas Sands president and chief operating officer Michael Leven.
I’m reading The Lazarus Heist, adapted from last year’s BBC World Service podcast of the same name about North Korea’s cybercrime wave that includes my comments on its casino angles. Author Geoff White puts Pyongyang’s high tech trespass in the context of the ruling Kim dynasty and the post-Cold War world. It’s a fascinating true crime read laced with geopolitical insight.
Note: The book repeats the podcast’s error of identifying me a Macau resident. Although I’ve been visiting Macau for decades and have on occasion spent weeks there on assignment, I have never been a Macau resident and never identified myself as one. White is working on a correction for future iterations of the book, and I’m grateful for that.
Lisboeta in Cotai recreates highlights of casino mogul Stanley Ho’s salad days in1960s Macau. (Image provided by Lisboeta)
People go to Macau to see replicas of Venice, Paris and London. With Lisboeta, Angela Leong is betting tourists will come to see Macau, more specifically, the Macau of her late husband and casino kingpin Stanley Ho. The resort stakes her family’s claim as proud heirs to Ho’s gaming legacy.
Muhammad Cohen 