Speaker 1: How a tiny British island fell into an international gambling scandal.
Speaker 1: Online casinos were a big driver of the Isle of
Speaker 1: Man's economy. Lately they've become a liability. By Jack Adamovich
Speaker 1: Davies read aloud by Mark Leedorf. On a cool April
Speaker 1: morning in twenty twenty four, dozens of British police bordered
Speaker 1: a ferry on England's northwest coast, bound for the Isle
Speaker 1: of Man. Their arrival was kept secret. Only the most
Speaker 1: senior officials on the island, a self governed state overseen
Speaker 1: by the UK, had been notified, according to a person
Speaker 1: debriefed after the raid, for fear of jeopardizing the largest
Speaker 1: law enforcement operation in the island's history. The target was
Speaker 1: King Gaming, one of dozens of companies licensed over the
Speaker 1: preceding decade to run online casinos from the island. Internet
Speaker 1: gambling had become a big business there by that point,
Speaker 1: the second largest contributor to gross domestic product, and Man's
Speaker 1: officials were pleased to have a growth engine for their economy.
Speaker 1: The Isle of Man had been slowly lurching toward a
Speaker 1: fiscal crisis. The territory of eighty six thousand has an
Speaker 1: aging population and one of the lowest birth rates on
Speaker 1: the planet. It was facing an acute version of an
Speaker 1: existential question in front of many developed economies today, how
Speaker 1: to fund basic government services alongside an increasing number of
Speaker 1: pensions and a decreasing number of taxpayers. Online gambling seemed
Speaker 1: as good an answer as any. In public statements, the
Speaker 1: government lauded King Gaming as a vision for the island's
Speaker 1: economic future. Ministers extended the company multimillion pound tax breaks
Speaker 1: and turned out for its promotional events off island. Though
Speaker 1: the company was in trouble. A court in Beijing had
Speaker 1: just found six former King Gaming employees guilty of scamming
Speaker 1: victims in China out of more than five million dollars
Speaker 1: from an operation based in the Isle of Man's capital, Douglas.
Speaker 1: The judgment, which described the company as a criminal organization,
Speaker 1: was the catalyst for a prolonged scandal on the island,
Speaker 1: prompting criticism from the United Nations, embarrassing government officials, severing
Speaker 1: an artery of its economy, and setting off raids on
Speaker 1: multiple companies, including King Gaming. On that day in April,
Speaker 1: British law enforcement arrived in Douglass at sunrise and rode
Speaker 1: in unmarked police cars with Island police to a King
Speaker 1: Gaming office just down the road from Parliament. Officers tried
Speaker 1: and failed to break down the door to the finance department,
Speaker 1: which was unusually well fortified for an office building, says
Speaker 1: a former King Gaming employee, who, like others who spoke
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, asked not to be identified because of
Speaker 1: the criminal allegations. Police went around to the back, smashed
Speaker 1: in a first floor window and climbed through in search
Speaker 1: of financial documents, some of the people say. Across town
Speaker 1: in a disused bank leased by the company for another
Speaker 1: one of its offices, police detained about forty workers for
Speaker 1: questioning by immigration authorities. According to reports from Isle of
Speaker 1: Man Today and Manx Radio, people were arrested, but none
Speaker 1: have been charged in the UK or Isle of Man.
Speaker 1: It would be another year before the Manx government took
Speaker 1: the problem seriously enough to institute a broader crackdown on
Speaker 1: illicit internet operations. In May twenty five, it issued what
Speaker 1: it called a new National Risk Appetite, citing an increasingly
Speaker 1: complex criminal landscape in East and Southeast Asia. Since April
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, fifty five companies operating on the island
Speaker 1: have surrendered their online gambling licenses or had them revoked.
Speaker 1: The figure represents an increase of more than one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty percent in the average rate licenses were canceled
Speaker 1: in the four years prior to the raid on King Gaming.
Speaker 1: Many of the conditions that have drawn international companies to
Speaker 1: the Isle of Man for years are the same ones
Speaker 1: that turned it into a haven for Asian Internet scammerings. Insurance, banking,
Speaker 1: and finance businesses have sought out the island for its
Speaker 1: low corporate tax rate in many cases zero, as well
Speaker 1: as its permissive legal and regulatory systems. Countries with economies
Speaker 1: in distress feel they have no choice but to offer
Speaker 1: these enticements to keep themselves afloat, But those same policies
Speaker 1: appeal to operators of legally dubious or outright criminal enterprises
Speaker 1: with gambling. In particular, government watchdogs were dangerously inattentive, and
Speaker 1: a revolving door that formed between regulators and the companies
Speaker 1: they were supposed to be regulating only complicated things, Yet
Speaker 1: in many cases it's not clear if the government's ignorance
Speaker 1: was wilful or naive. Jonathan Davies, the head of Government
Speaker 1: communication for the Isle of Man says that regulators did
Speaker 1: their best with the information available to them at the time,
Speaker 1: and that the island has strengthened its oversight and enforcement.
Speaker 1: Any suggestion that regulators have compromised or reduced due diligence, supervision, scrutiny,
Speaker 1: or enforcement as a result of political or economic pressures
Speaker 1: is categorically false, he wrote in an emailed statement. John Webster,
Speaker 1: born across the water in Liverpool, summered on the island
Speaker 1: as a child. From nineteen seventy six to nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: he served as the Isle of Man's chief economist. Webster
Speaker 1: later started a dot com business there, and by the
Speaker 1: mid two thousands it was one of the first gambling
Speaker 1: sites on the island. He lobbied the government to embrace
Speaker 1: the new industry, and at that time Webster insists it
Speaker 1: was all clean. We use the expression no one wants
Speaker 1: to lie with dogs because they get fleas. He says.
Speaker 1: As Webster sees it, the island's cultural predisposition toward hospitality
Speaker 1: created an opening for criminals to take advantage. The government
Speaker 1: is constantly looking for the next best thing because we
Speaker 1: haven't got a good thing at the moment, He says,
Speaker 1: it's quite obvious now in retrospect. If you go into
Speaker 1: a gray market where you've got lots of criminal gangs
Speaker 1: and triads, then you have to be super cautious, otherwise
Speaker 1: people are going to abuse the opportunity. The Isle of
Speaker 1: Man is famous for a few things. A stubby tailed
Speaker 1: breed of house cat called the Manx, an annual motorcycle
Speaker 1: race where a competitor's routinely die on the mountainous course,
Speaker 1: and a long and unfortunate reputation for criminality. Generations of
Speaker 1: Vikings used the island as a base to raid England
Speaker 1: and Ireland before departing in the thirteenth century. Four hundred
Speaker 1: years later, a thriving running trade smuggled goods ashore to
Speaker 1: England by passing import taxes. The British Parliament, tired of
Speaker 1: hemorrhaging treasure, effectively ended that trade when it bought the
Speaker 1: island's sovereignty from its feudal ruler, but allowed it to
Speaker 1: remain independent for a time. In the early eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Island law didn't recognize foreign claims on personal debt, which
Speaker 1: lured to its shores a cash rich assortment of swindlers, bankrupts,
Speaker 1: deposed French aristocrats, and dissolute gamblers. As Spencer Walpole, the
Speaker 1: island's Lieutenant Governor and British crown representative at that time,
Speaker 1: observed from the first mention of the Isle of Man
Speaker 1: at the dawn of history, we find that its inhabitants
Speaker 1: had taken advantage of their geographical position to derive some
Speaker 1: illicit gains from the nations which surrounded them. The Isle
Speaker 1: of Man was fully committed to online gambling by the
Speaker 1: time the government appointed Mark Robeson head of e Gaming
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen. Robesen came with a decade of experience
Speaker 1: working at internet casinos in the UK. His job was
Speaker 1: to entice online gambling companies to the island, pitching a
Speaker 1: light touch regulatory regime. The job took him to offices
Speaker 1: and conventions all around the world. As he'd recall years
Speaker 1: later in a message to colleagues found in a cache
Speaker 1: of King Gaming e mails reviewed by BusinessWeek, it was
Speaker 1: at one such conference in Berlin that he met Bill Morgan.
Speaker 1: Morgan is originally from China. He grew up in Anhui,
Speaker 1: among the less prosperous provinces on the Mainland. He ditched
Speaker 1: his birth name Liang ling Fei in twenty sixteen when
Speaker 1: he became a naturalized citizen of the Dominican Republic. Robeson
Speaker 1: wrote that in their first meeting, Morgan identified himself as
Speaker 1: a stockbroker with thousands of high net worth clients in China.
Speaker 1: Tired of merely executing their trades, Morgan said he wanted
Speaker 1: to help his clients gamble their entire fortunes instead. This
Speaker 1: was a tricky proposition. All forms of gambling have been
Speaker 1: outlawed in China since nineteen forty nine, relegated to underground
Speaker 1: games run by Chinese organized crime syndicates, or a legalized
Speaker 1: system in Macau where more money is gambled each year
Speaker 1: than in Las Vegas. Soon after their first meeting, Morgan
Speaker 1: and his team flew to the Isle of Man, and
Speaker 1: a month after that, Morgan and Robesen met again at
Speaker 1: a trade fair in Macau. Another month later, I was
Speaker 1: in Beijing meeting a much much bigger team, Robeson wrote
Speaker 1: in one of the emails seen by BusinessWeek, everything was
Speaker 1: gaining momentum. By everything, Robesen was referring to a job opportunity.
Speaker 1: In March twenty seventeen. He and Morgan, who in internal
Speaker 1: company messages was almost always referred to as BM, founded
Speaker 1: King Gaming together. Neither responded to repeated requests for comment.
Speaker 1: Not to be confused with King dot com, the maker
Speaker 1: of candy Crush, King Gaming would specialize in live streamed
Speaker 1: casino games and sports betting. It had offer a mix
Speaker 1: of Western games such as Baccarat, Roulette slots, and Texas Holdham,
Speaker 1: as well as Eastern ones such as the dice game,
Speaker 1: seek Bo and fan Tan, in which players bet on
Speaker 1: the number of objects that will be left on the
Speaker 1: table after the dealer removes them in groups of four.
Speaker 1: Hiring robeson from the Island's Department for Enterprise, where he
Speaker 1: was in charge of promoting the gambling industry, lent the
Speaker 1: company international credibility and political access. But even from the
Speaker 1: seemingly safe remove of the Isle of Man, Morgan was
Speaker 1: clearly aware of the hazards surrounding the new venture. He
Speaker 1: signed a waiver with one of King Gaming's vendors saying
Speaker 1: he was aware of the personal risks associated with setting
Speaker 1: up and running an online gaming business, which targets China.
Speaker 1: The company sought to develop more formal ties with the
Speaker 1: island's government. It moved into an office in Douglas whose
Speaker 1: only other tenant was a recruitment agency called mackenzie Fox
Speaker 1: co owned by then Treasury Minister Alfred Kanaan, whose department
Speaker 1: oversaw the island's gambling regulator, and his wife. King Gaming
Speaker 1: soon signed McKenzie Fox as its exclusive on island recruiter
Speaker 1: and agreed to pay at least seventy six five hundred
Speaker 1: pounds about one hundred and two thousand dollars for those services,
Speaker 1: according to invoices and emails. While Robeson helped cultivate these relationships,
Speaker 1: he began to express a growing sense of paranoia that
Speaker 1: representatives from his Sino Dominican business partner were running some
Speaker 1: kind of shadow company behind his back that went beyond
Speaker 1: the bounds of quasi legal gambling. If staff here are
Speaker 1: working on things I don't know about, not only could
Speaker 1: this leave our companies in trouble, but I would also
Speaker 1: be personally liable and potentially prosecuted. Robeson the company's chief
Speaker 1: executive officer wrote in a typical email from twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: these things carry very high risks for me, and the
Speaker 1: penalties include, but are not restricted to large financial fines
Speaker 1: and jail. King Gaming was still seeking approval from the
Speaker 1: Gambling Supervision Commission for its flagship online casino kgvip dot
Speaker 1: com and couldn't legally operate until it secured a license,
Speaker 1: which is probably why Robeson's email compulsion entered overdrive. That November,
Speaker 1: Robeson said he'd received a message from Mark Varley, the
Speaker 1: Gambling Supervision Commission inspector in charge of monitoring King Gaming's activities,
Speaker 1: with a link to a website that appeared to be
Speaker 1: a wholesale clone of the one King Gaming had pitched
Speaker 1: privately to regulators. The only difference was that this one
Speaker 1: was live on the internet. What were your initial thoughts
Speaker 1: regarding similarities to the test site, Varley asked. Robeson responded
Speaker 1: a few days later with the company's assessment while it
Speaker 1: was still investigating what had happened. He told Varley that
Speaker 1: the team believed the site's source code had been pinched
Speaker 1: by an Asian company that King Gaming had considered working
Speaker 1: with a few months earlier. Varley accepted the explanation and
Speaker 1: the matter was closed. The regulator granted King Gaming a
Speaker 1: license in July twenty seventeen, Yet there were other warning
Speaker 1: signs that Bank's officials seemed to overlook. In twenty eighteen, Morgan,
Speaker 1: the owner of King Gaming, had been named President of
Speaker 1: the Chamber of Commerce for the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone,
Speaker 1: a self governed enclave in Laos where drug smuggling and
Speaker 1: human trafficking ran rampant. The US Department of the Treasury
Speaker 1: had sanctioned the Chamber's chairman, Jao Way, and his companies
Speaker 1: earlier that year, largely for their management of the zone.
Speaker 1: Why has denied wrongdoing? The vast majority of activity in
Speaker 1: the zone is illicit, spanning drugs, human trafficking, child sexual exploitation,
Speaker 1: and crucially cybercrime, says John Woochik, a former analyst at
Speaker 1: the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes, Bangkok Bureau. It's
Speaker 1: certainly a massive red flag and should be treated as
Speaker 1: such by any authority considering doing business with Bill Morgan.
Speaker 1: Yet the Isle of Man was thrilled to have Morgan's business,
Speaker 1: and by the end of twenty eighteen, revenue from the
Speaker 1: online gambling sector was the single largest contributor to its economy.
Speaker 1: King Gaming had developed a symbiotic relationship with the government,
Speaker 1: though that relationship would soon get a little more complicated.
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, Robesen received an e mail from Bellow Whitbread,
Speaker 1: the wife of the Treasury Minister and co owner of
Speaker 1: King Gaming's recruitment firm. Varley was looking for a job.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with How a tiny British island
Speaker 1: fell into an international gambling scandal. Welcome back to How
Speaker 1: a tiny British island fell into an international gambling scandal.
Speaker 1: Born on the island in nineteen eighty two, Varley had
Speaker 1: a wanderer's curiosity. He left for England and earned a
Speaker 1: law degree from the University of Leeds, where he also
Speaker 1: enrolled in the British Army's University Officer Training Corps. He
Speaker 1: then spent close to a decade in China before returning
Speaker 1: home to join the Gambling Supervision Commission. His fluency in
Speaker 1: Chinese and on the ground experience in the country made
Speaker 1: him a valuable asset on a team largely monitoring Asia
Speaker 1: Fi casinos. Still, Varley was getting restless. Robeson knew Varley
Speaker 1: could be an asset to King Gaming, and he told
Speaker 1: the recruiter to schedule an interview, but Robeson also recognized
Speaker 1: that the situation could get ugly, writing in an email
Speaker 1: to colleagues in December twenty nineteen, due to the fact
Speaker 1: he is our inspector, there is a high risk to
Speaker 1: our business if he doesn't interview well or we decide
Speaker 1: not to offer him a job. He met Varley that
Speaker 1: afternoon and reported back his impressions the next day. I
Speaker 1: don't have any doubts on his capability, Robeson wrote, My
Speaker 1: concern is with his personality and I don't know if
Speaker 1: he would be a good fit within our group. A
Speaker 1: week later, at two pm on Friday the thirteenth, Varley
Speaker 1: visited King Gaming's office, not as the company's inspector, though
Speaker 1: he still held that role, but to have his Mandarin
Speaker 1: skills put through their paces by two Chinese speaking directors.
Speaker 1: They were impressed, but the company deferred its hiring decision
Speaker 1: until the new year. In the meantime, Robeson and Varley
Speaker 1: continued to exchange formalities over regulatory matters via email. Varley
Speaker 1: came in for one more interview on February eleventh, and
Speaker 1: the next afternoon, King Gaming extended him a formal job offer.
Speaker 1: For whatever reason, Varley sent an email an hour later
Speaker 1: from his official government account asking for clarification on the
Speaker 1: company's quarterly returns That appears to be his final message
Speaker 1: as King Gaming's inspector. He joined the company as corporate
Speaker 1: affairs manager just as the Isle of Man was preparing
Speaker 1: to close its borders to international travel to halt the
Speaker 1: spread of COVID nineteen. But the pandemic created an opportunity
Speaker 1: of a different kind for King Gaming. Robeson told his
Speaker 1: fellow directors in May twenty twenty that he'd met with
Speaker 1: ex colleagues and politicians that I used to work with.
Speaker 1: He wrote, due to the impacts of Corona virus, they
Speaker 1: are now even more keen to offer assistance to us.
Speaker 1: Within three days, the government extended the company as much
Speaker 1: as five point ninety two million pounds in state funds
Speaker 1: and tax breaks to relocate up to two hundred foreign
Speaker 1: workers and construct a corporate campus for them to live
Speaker 1: and work in. At that point, regulators hadn't yet detected
Speaker 1: anything was off. The island's regulatory and law enforcement bodies
Speaker 1: take a zero tolerance approach to criminal activity, using enforcement action, investigations,
Speaker 1: and international cooperation to prevent, detect, and disrupt it Davies,
Speaker 1: the government spokesman wrote in an email, license holders are
Speaker 1: subject to thorough due diligence at entry and ongoing monitoring
Speaker 1: in line with international anti money laundering and countering financial
Speaker 1: crime requirements. Within King Gaming's leadership, though fractures were forming.
Speaker 1: Late that year, one of the directors made an alarming
Speaker 1: discovery A vast and diffuse network of international gambling sites
Speaker 1: was operating on King Gaming server and unknown people in
Speaker 1: the Philippines were claiming to represent the company there. This person,
Speaker 1: who asked not to be identified, says he reported the
Speaker 1: findings to Robesen, who immediately emailed representatives from Morgan. Robeson
Speaker 1: asked them to find a way to put a stop
Speaker 1: to it, and said if the regulator found out, our
Speaker 1: license could be in trouble. Shortly after, the director learned
Speaker 1: he'd been fired. Days later, the now former director walked
Speaker 1: into the Gambling Supervision Commission and made a whistleblower claim.
Speaker 1: He offered to walk the regulator through the evidence and
Speaker 1: was promised to follow up meeting. He says he never
Speaker 1: heard back, nor did the regulator broach the subject with
Speaker 1: King Gaming. Despite emerging comfortably from the scare, Morgan apparently
Speaker 1: wanted to clean house. He asked for Robeson's resignation, according
Speaker 1: to an email from the head of human resources. On
Speaker 1: learning of his ouster, Robeson began musing about shadow directors,
Speaker 1: illicitly calling the shots, and talking as though he were
Speaker 1: considering becoming a whistleblower too. Instead, he negotiated a nineteen
Speaker 1: page settlement agreement that garnered him one hundred and sixteen
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty pounds in exchange for his silence
Speaker 1: with robes and gone. King Gaming had a new project.
Speaker 1: It was looking to acquire a company in the Philippines
Speaker 1: called c S Global Technology for fifty thousand dollars and
Speaker 1: import its staff to the Isle of Man using what's
Speaker 1: known as an intra company transfer or ICT visa. Now,
Speaker 1: Varley became the company's Hey, what's really going on here? Guy?
Speaker 1: After reviewing cs Global's books, he circulated a memo asking
Speaker 1: why the current owners were willing to sell for such
Speaker 1: a low price when they'd reported investing about four times
Speaker 1: that amount into the business. Moreover, how was cs global
Speaker 1: even making payroll? The company has had no real expenses
Speaker 1: in the last two years. How can we justify to
Speaker 1: Immigration that thirty plus staff have worked there for at
Speaker 1: least twelve months for ict purposes. Barley wrote his concerns
Speaker 1: went unheeded, and by July twenty twenty one, the deal
Speaker 1: was done. The visa applications contained red flags. Most of
Speaker 1: the applicants Philippines work permits had been issued to a
Speaker 1: company identified in internal King Gaming emails as a subsidiary
Speaker 1: of the Oriental Group owned by Kim Wong, who has
Speaker 1: been repeatedly accused in the Philippines Senate and other venues
Speaker 1: as having ties to organized crime, which he's largely denied.
Speaker 1: Fifteen applications contained records of travel to and work in
Speaker 1: the Golden Triangle. Immigration officials rubber stamped all the applications
Speaker 1: under a government financial assistance program that gives companies as
Speaker 1: much as ten thousand pounds for each worker it brings
Speaker 1: to the island. King Gaming took full advantage. The new
Speaker 1: arrivals were kept separate from the rest of the workforce.
Speaker 1: They were housed in seafront hotels. King Gaming had bought
Speaker 1: or leased from businesses that had been decimated by the
Speaker 1: COVID closures. Restaurant standard walk burners were brought in for
Speaker 1: the workers to prepare their meals. A former IT worker
Speaker 1: at the company who requested anonymity, says he was tasked
Speaker 1: with setting up the tech infrastructure in the buildings, including
Speaker 1: an extensive virtual private network that tunneled web traffic through
Speaker 1: Chinese servers. In hindsight, he says, the system was surely
Speaker 1: meant to conceal the worker's connection to Kink Gaming. The
Speaker 1: BBC later reported on accusations that these hotels were a
Speaker 1: home base for King Gaming employees to conduct so called
Speaker 1: pig butchering scams, where victims online are misled through flattery
Speaker 1: and metaphorically bled for money. King Gaming eventually ran out
Speaker 1: of run down hotels and old banks to pack its
Speaker 1: staff into, which is why it set out to create
Speaker 1: the seventy million pound campus on the outskirts of Douglas.
Speaker 1: The government touted it as the largest single private investment
Speaker 1: in the Isle of Man. The proposed glass and steel
Speaker 1: facility would have space for not only King Gaming's business activities,
Speaker 1: but also accommodations for as many as sixty six employees.
Speaker 1: When ground broke in July twenty twenty three, Enterprise Minister
Speaker 1: Tim Johnston praised it as a landmark development that embodies
Speaker 1: the ambitions of the Department for Enterprise to develop, diversify
Speaker 1: and grow the island's economy. In late twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: Alfred Canaan agreed to meet for an interview on the island. Canaan,
Speaker 1: the former Treasury Minister, was now Chief Minister, essentially the
Speaker 1: prime Minister. He'd been elected a few year years earlier,
Speaker 1: and eventually gave up his job at Mackenzie Fox. He
Speaker 1: transferred his shares in the company to his wife in
Speaker 1: November twenty twenty one, but stayed on as a director
Speaker 1: and company secretary until October twenty twenty four, hours before
Speaker 1: our planned interview, Though a foreign affairs advisor reached out
Speaker 1: to say the meeting was off. It appeared that Canaan
Speaker 1: didn't want to talk about the country's gambling problem. Someone
Speaker 1: who was willing to speak, albeit briefly, was Whitbread, the
Speaker 1: Chief Minister's former business partner and soon to be former wife.
Speaker 1: She was in the process of divorcing him. She seemed
Speaker 1: to know exactly what the phone call was about. She
Speaker 1: couldn't comment on King Gaming, she said, because she'd never
Speaker 1: done business with the company, Seemingly forgetting the close to
Speaker 1: eighty thousand pounds of invoices she'd sent to it. You
Speaker 1: will not find anything on us, no connection to anything.
Speaker 1: We're PEPs, she said, using the compliance acronym for politically
Speaker 1: exposed persons. I can't possibly be involved in any of
Speaker 1: that nonsense. If we smell anything, sniff anything, think anything,
Speaker 1: we give people very wide berths. And then she revealed
Speaker 1: something striking. I've got a blanket approach now Asian gaming firms,
Speaker 1: no thank you. King Gaming had amassed a great deal
Speaker 1: of political clout through its connection with Canaan and Whitbread's
Speaker 1: firm and its employment of former government workers. But the
Speaker 1: regulator to casino operator pipeline wasn't just happening there. Ableton
Speaker 1: Prestige Global, another online casino operator, ran a similar playbook.
Speaker 1: It also shared an office with Mackenzie Fox. It also
Speaker 1: hired a senior official from the Gambling Supervision Commission. It
Speaker 1: also had to forfeit its license and was raided. Ableton
Speaker 1: declined to comment. To some the vulnerabilities of this system
Speaker 1: are evident. It creates a risk that privileged information and
Speaker 1: access will be used to game the system, says Ben Kawdock,
Speaker 1: lead investigator at the corruption watchdog Transparency International UK. Mark Rutherford,
Speaker 1: CEO of the Gambling Supervision Commission, doesn't see a problem
Speaker 1: with it. His agency will always support staff that looked
Speaker 1: to progress their career, he says, curtailing that would impinge
Speaker 1: on their rights. For Varley, the career progression was short lived.
Speaker 1: Years before the raid on King Gaming, he returned to
Speaker 1: a post in government. He serves on a team in
Speaker 1: charge of investigating international money laundering, King Gaming being one
Speaker 1: of the largest cases. The members of his group have
Speaker 1: probably done more than anyone else to force a reluctant
Speaker 1: Manx political class to acknowledge the scale of the problem.
Speaker 1: As much as the raid on King Gaming caused a
Speaker 1: stir in the Manx government, it was a report from
Speaker 1: the UN later in twenty twenty four that really made
Speaker 1: an impact. It highlighted the Isle of Man as a
Speaker 1: vulnerable jurisdiction where Asian criminals were exploiting relaxed regulations and
Speaker 1: the relative ease with which gambling licenses can be obtained
Speaker 1: to launder billions in criminal proceeds into the financial system
Speaker 1: without accountability. Man's officials were furious not it seemed, about
Speaker 1: the idea they were being taken advantage of by gangsters,
Speaker 1: at least not at first. They were mad that the
Speaker 1: UN published the claim. Rutherford told Isle of Man Today
Speaker 1: that he was disappointed in the UN's report. But by
Speaker 1: early twenty twenty five, the government's view on internet gambling
Speaker 1: had changed, and the island put out its National Risk
Speaker 1: Appetite Statement declaring it had limited appetite for any more
Speaker 1: online casinos owned or controlled from East or Southeast Asia.
Speaker 1: After the Chinese judgment against King Gaming, the Isle of
Speaker 1: Man Police opened its own fraud in money laundering investigation.
Speaker 1: No charges have been filed yet, but the situation is
Speaker 1: bound to have an impact on the island's elections this September.
Speaker 1: Canaan defeated a no confidence vote two years ago that,
Speaker 1: while not directly connected to the King Gaming controversy, was
Speaker 1: motivated by concerns about transparency and budget shortfalls, issues that
Speaker 1: have a direct bearing on the government's handling of the
Speaker 1: online gambling industry. Even still, the political debate over how
Speaker 1: to handle internet gambling is not entirely resolved. The island
Speaker 1: economy lost a substantial source of tax revenue from the crackdown,
Speaker 1: and it's still moving toward a fiscal Cliff, international crimes aside.
Speaker 1: The island sure could use the money. Lyle Rexall, who
Speaker 1: runs an agency of the Department for Enterprise dedicated to
Speaker 1: digital economic growth, addressed the topic at an industry conference
Speaker 1: in November. According to a report in the local newspaper,
Speaker 1: the National Risk Appetite statement was a huge misstep. He said,
Speaker 1: I'd say nothing more than a cuckop. It's a pretty
Speaker 1: big one, right,