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CODE 18-77 AWO Ltd. 7/84
The low wages
worker in a factory received about HK$1200. paid by the manufacturers (mostly textiles, toys and electronics) had made Macao competitive in overseas markets and attractive to foreign investors but the disparity was problem.
a
His
6.
I was escorted to the office of John Ho (head of the gambling syndicate and brother of Stanley Ho) by a circuitous route through the various gaming rooms and beyond two steel doors. Mr Ho is 71 and full of colourful stories. The stories tend to run into one another and it is not always clear when one ends and the next begins. office is functional with a television monitor, a typewriter and a teleprinter that links him to his brother in Hong Kong. On his desk is a sign facing his visitors which says, "Happiness to all". He first came to Macao as a boy. His father brought him on a day trip. He said his father was not a gambler but enjoyed a flutter. In those days the attractions of Macao were gambling, girls and opium. Now he believed there were no opium dens. Just before the beginning of the Second World War John went on a trip to Saigon and could not get back to Hong Kong. He stayed in Vietnam for 26 years. Meanwhile brother Stanley had left Hong Kong for Macao where he spent the war [Stanley told me he was the controller of supplies in Macao]. Stanley bid for and secured the gambling concession in the 1960s and one of the conditions was that he should help develop tourism. On the way to Lisbon to sign the contract he saw a jetfoil in Italy and he bought one. Another, later, condition was that his company should dredge the harbour free of charge and also build low cost housing. John told me about many of Stanley's rivals in the gambling business but it was all rather confusing. of the rivals bought a number of jet foils. He had made his money from gold. Bullion was flown from Saigon into Macao on a Catalina flying boat and then disappeared (to Hong Kong it seems). John said he was not a gambler and had never invested 50 cents in a slot machine. He suggested that it was really quite easy to become a millionaire from gambling but it was necessary to start
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as a billionaire. Alternatively one could buy a casino. He said the present concession gave the Government of Macao 25% of the revenue. Next year it would be 26% and so on until 1991 when the arrangement would have to be renegotiated. The Government sent officials each day to count the takings. They gave John a note of their count: he opened the envelope containing the previous day's reckoning and showed me the figures. The casinos made a loss of the equivalent of £600,000: not a good day, said John, but encouraging for the gamblers. Normally the Government would take about £6 million a month [at 25% this means the revenue is about £l million a day).
7. I called on Edmund Ho, the General Manager of the Tai Fung Bank. This is the main retail bank in Macao, 50% owned by the Bank of China and the rest held by Mr Ho's family. He said he thought the economic future of Macao depended on attracting more investors to set up
/manufacturing