Singapore questions Genting over link with Macau investors

The government’s statement comes more than two weeks after Genting agreed to sell a 7.52-percent stake in its leisure cruise unit Star Cruises to the Macau gambling tycoon and four other investors by issuing new shares and options.

The new investors will have a 6.99-percent stake in Star Cruises after the transaction.

In the deal, announced on January 23, Star Cruises and its Singapore-listed affiliate Genting International, took a 75-percent stake in a property project in Macau to be operated by Ho.

Star Cruises and Genting International won Singapore’s second gaming concession in December. "The casino regulation division is seeking clarification from Star Cruises and Genting International about the share placement and the other deals in Macau," Ministry of Home Affairs casino regulation division manager James Chan told Reuters in an email.

The regulator had previously said that it would conduct suitability checks on its casino operators "as and when necessary". A spokesman for Genting International said it was providing clarifications sought by the state regulator.

Singapore’s pro-government Straits Times newspaper had reported that Genting’s Macau deal had "raised a red flag with the authorities" and cited an unnamed source as saying that U.S. consultants hired by the government for probity checks into the casino bidders had returned to Singapore.

The first casino licence was awarded in May to US gaming giant Las Vegas Sands, which has promised to build a casino along Singapore’s downtown waterfront for us$ 3.6 billion. The two resorts, expected to open by 2010, are aimed at wooing tourists and boosting the city-state’s services sector.

Ho, one of the world’s richest men, had a monopoly on operating casinos in Macau for four decades until it was opened up to other players in 2002. The former Portuguese colony, with a reputation for massage parlours and triad gangs, is the only place in gambling-mad China where casino gaming is legal. Casino revenues in the tiny enclave on the South China coast rose 23 percent in 2006 to nearly us$ 7 billion, surpassing those generated along the glitzier Las Vegas Strip.