The businessman Zhao Wei has established close relationships to Laos’s communist elite. Reports The Diplomat.
A secretive, sanctioned Chinese casino mogul is looking to expand his economic empire in Laos, unfurling plans to develop tourism projects and other business ventures in remote corners of the country.
Wikipedia say
Zhao Wei is a Chinese gangster and the founder of Hong Kong-registered company Kings Romans Group (formed in 2007),[1] which owns the Kings Romans casino franchise. Zhao Wei is currently under sanctions by the United States Treasury Department for his involvement in laundering money and assisting in the storage and distribution of heroin, methamphetamine, and other narcotics for illicit networks, including the United Wa State Army which operates in Myanmar.[2] [3] [4] Based in Laos within the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), Zhao Wei is also reported to engage in human trafficking, bribery, wildlife trafficking and other forms of transnational organized crime.[5] Much of this illicit activity is facilitated through the Kings Romans casino franchise located within the GTSEZ.[6]
According to a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA)’s Lao service, an indispensable portal to news from the communist-ruled nation, the businessman Zhao Wei toured Saravan province in southern Laos and met with the provincial governor “to discuss the possibility of developing an airport and investing in several agricultural and tourism development projects.”
RFA quoted local officials as saying that Zhao visited tracts of land in a district on the border with Vietnam, along with land surveyors. “They conducted a survey on a stretch of land near the Lao-Vietnamese border to plant commercial trees,” one official said.
Zhao Wei is the chairman of the Kings Romans Group, which in 2007 was granted a 99-year lease over what became known as the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), a gambling and tourism enclave in a remote pocket of the country’s northwest, close to the point where the borders of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand converge.
Before setting up in Laos, Zhao, a businessman from China’s Heilongjiang province, is known to have once operated casinos in Macao and in Mong La, a town on the border between China’s Yunnan province and a rebel-controlled zone in Myanmar that has become notorious as a center for border-hopping Chinese gamblers.
Read more at https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/chinese-casino-magnates-empire-set-to-expand-in-laos/
