Over 3000 crores rolled annually in off shore and on shore casinos, less than 30 crores paid as taxes
It’s a mind boggling parade of a lot of the nations’ blackmoney. Money dumped in to floating and land casinos in Goa by a growing numberof heavy rollers, funded by a network of hawala operators, cricket bookies andthe most influential money dealers called the junket kings.
The investigation carried out by The Goan, reveals a murkyunderbelly of black money and sleaze, by a network of operators from outsideGoa, who actually fund and run the casino business with mutual benefits.
According to estimates, based on discreet but quite specificamounts rolled in each of the four off shore casinos alone, about 2000 croresis rolled annually.
Add another Rs 1000 crores in the eight land based casinosand you have a mind boggling figure of 3000 crores. This is close to the Rs4200 annual expenditure of the entire Goa government.
The turnover shown is roughly one fifth of the amountactually rolled. A senior official of Goa’s finance department confirmed to TheGoan ‘We have no idea of the amount of chips given out every day, month or yearby each if the casinos. There is no trace of how much money comes in and fromwhere”.
The Commissioner Commercial Taxes S G Korgoankar, Commissionerof Commercial taxes, gives the game away when he says “We rely on casinosadmissions to ascertain their transactions”.
It is the nature and extent of the black money operationsthat your newspaper unearths. So here it is, in the raw. Junket Kings-Casinosnexus: Anyone familiar with gambling parlance in Goa knows that it is the“junket agents” that fund the big players who actually bring in money forcasinos.
Without them, the business doesn’t move. The junket agents,mainly based in North India, Gujarat and Maharashtra have deals with each ofthe casinos where they have ‘accounts”. They deal with big players who do notcarry cash. Before the player goes to the casino, the junket agents sendinformation via SMS to the casino to hand over a specific amount of chips to theplayer. If the player wins, the winning amounts are credited to the Junket’saccount.
If the player loses and additional amounts are needed, thejunket sends another SMS to raise the limit. The casino pays the junket agentbetween five and thirty percent of the amount rolled.
The junket agent, who knows the player well, settles hisaccounts with him later.
For the casinos, it’s a win-win. A head of one of theonshore casinos remarked “Though this happens mainly in the floating ones, it’sa win-win for all of us.
The junket agents guarantee big players and big players rollbig.” In fact one of the main activities of any marketing team of a casino isto trace and do deals with junket agents.
This is how people like Mickey Mouse, Hemant Bhandari, RaviNepal, Humayun Chandiwallah and his trusted assistant Pankaj started operationsin Goa.
Most of them move from being distant operators to a majorpresence on the boats where they have expanded by taking over certain tables oroperations like flush and running them as mini profit centers, within thecasino operations. In the absence of a gaming authority with responsiblerepresentatives from the industry, there is no control mechanism.
The fear is that there is no knowledge from where this blackmoney trail starts and this is where concerns of security rise. As The Goanfollows this, the Commercial Taxes, the Income Tax and most importantly thesecurity agencies not just in Goa but across the country must wake up to this24x 365 black money rolling that goes on in Goa.
