A Vietnamese official has said the country must develop regulations to prevent its citizens from crossing the border to gamble in Cambodian casinos, Viet Nam News, the national English-language daily, reported yesterday.
According to the Vietnamese newspaper, Mai Van Huynh, chairman of Ha Tien Town People’s Committee, said: “Many families have gone bankrupt or sold their property to cover gambling losses in Cambodia.”
Vietnamese citizens are forbidden to gamble in Vietnamese casinos, which cater solely to a foreign clientele. According to Mr Huynh, however, Vietnamese law cannot presently be applied to citizens who go to Cambodia to gamble.
That is why Vietnam needs to crack down on people who organize or encourage gambling, Mr Huynh said, adding that since casinos opened near the Prek Chak border checkpoint in Kampot province, Vietnamese tourists had been flocking there to gamble.
According to Viet Nam News, Kien Giang province near the border has about 500 residents who regularly cross into Cambodia to gamble, 40 of whom have gone bankrupt and some of whom have committed suicide.
Although the article paints a bleak picture of the negative effects gambling is having on the Vietnamese, Ngat Thea, a dealer at a Kampot casino, told a very different story.
According to Mr Thea, the Vietnamese who come from Kien Giang are not high rollers and the number of gamblers from the province is decreasing.
“They have no money to gamble,” Mr Thea said. “It is not like the Cambodian-Vietnamese border in [Svay Rieng province’s Bavet City], where the Vietnamese gamblers are rich men from Ho Chi Minh City.”
He added that about 100 Vietnamese come to gamble at his casino daily but spend only a few hours before crossing back.
“I think some smaller casinos will have to close their doors soon, because nowadays people don’t have the money to gamble,” Mr Thea said.
Phan Sophal, police chief at the Prek Chak international checkpoint, said there were three casinos currently operating near the border, with about 200 to 300 Vietnamese crossing daily to gamble. He could not confirm whether numbers had gone down.
Mey Vann, director of the financial industry department at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, said he was satisfied with new developments in border casino operations, but added that Cambodia needed to develop a system to monitor “bad gamblers.”
Cambodians are forbidden by law from gambling in Cambodia, though it is not clear how thoroughly the law is enforced, and the country’s gambling industry has been tarnished in the past by links to organized crime.
Cambodia’s neighbors have long complained of the negative social effects that gambling in Cambodia has on their citizens, but have seemed mostly unable to prevent them from crossing the border to try their luck in Cambodia’s border-town casinos.
