“Our goal is to earn back the trust and confidence of AUSTRAC and all our regulators. We will continue to work with AUSTRAC as we build a better, stronger and more sustainable company,” he said in a statement to the ASX.
How much work that will involve is illustrated by the statement of claim.
AUSTRAC alleges Star allowed 1221 customers to gamble $617.6 million through high-risk channels, and provided gambling services to 117 customers considered to have high ML/TF risks.
The AUSTRAC statement of claim details many of the Star’s interactions with these 117 customers and paints a picture of a company with an incredibly high-risk tolerance.
The star of the show is ‘Customer 1’, who would appear to be Alvin Chau, the owner of the Suncity junket currently facing court in Macau on a string of charges, including fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling.
Chau, whose junket brought VIP punters from Asia to Star in exchange for a revenue share, funded $1.8 billion worth of gambling between 2016 and 2020, with his customers punting more than $15 billion in total.
Alvin Chau, founder and chairman of Suncity Group Holdings. Bloomberg
But AUSTRAC says Star knew that by November 2016 Chau was a foreign ‘politically exposed person’ and had been “arrested overseas on a number of occasions during police investigations into loan sharking, criminal intimidation, blackmail and unlawful detention” although never charged. In addition, it’s alleged Star knew a Suncity account…
