Aussie Crown execs set for release saturday

It’s been 10 months of anxiety and stress in Chinese jails for Australian Crown Resorts VIP marketing exec Jason O’Connor and four other Crown employees arrested for promoting gambling in China last year (see previous reports), but on Saturday it will all be over bar deportation formalities, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review.

For O’Connor’s company it’s been an expensive lesson that promoting to high roller Chinese gamblers is not tolerated by the Chinese authorities, who have clearly been closely monitoring the activities of foreign gambling groups on Chinese soil.

Crown reportedly paid A$1.7 million a head in fines to get its people out after filing guilty pleas.

The AFR claims that during 2016 alone Chinese whales spent A$875 million in Crown casinos, and after the Chinese push-back the gambling group saw its VIP turnover to June 30 this year take a 49 percent hit.

Our readers may recall that O’Connor and over a dozen Crown employees – several of them Australian or Malaysian nationals – were detained in a Chinese police swoop last year, accused of promoting gambling, although the charges took some time to emerge.

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