Vietnam’s legal framework regulating the country’s casino industry is “still very unsophisticated and immature”, with the main areas of concern being oversight of junket operations and the extension of credit to gamblers for betting purposes. That is according to Luís Mesquita de Melo, general counsel at Hoi An South Development Ltd, the developer and operator of Hoiana Resort & Golf, a beachside holiday complex with a foreigner-only casino on Vietnam’s central coast.
“Vietnam is, obviously, an emerging jurisdiction, and as such, it has all the pains of trying to find its [own] way,” Mr Mesquita de Melo (pictured second right) said.
“The current regulatory system in Vietnam is still very unsophisticated and immature, and therefore there are a lot of loopholes, which create significant challenges – especially for legal practitioners trying to understand the system,” he added.
Mr Mesquita de Melo’s comments were made on Friday, during a panel discussion titled “The Latest Compliance Issues Faced by Gaming Operators”. It formed part of the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia 2025 casino trade show and conference. The three-day event at the Venetian Macao casino resort concluded on Friday.
During his remarks, Mr Mesquita de Melo explained that Vietnam’s gaming decree – the country’s “main piece of legislation” in this field – was enacted in early 2017.
“That framework should have been developed and completed with a number of subsequent regulations, which actually never happened,” he added.
The legal expert – who also has extensive experience in the Macau market – stated that “one of the biggest problems” gaming businesses face in Vietnam is the lack of an official gaming regulatory body.
He added: “Vietnam, being a civil law system, has a very specific approach to the rule of law in the sense that the law is not ever really applied until it becomes the object of an administrative decision. This means that for everything you want to do, there is this mindset that you have to ask the government how to do it.”
He further stated: “This obviously creates an additional layer of problems, in the sense that you never really know how the law is going to be interpreted. And when the law itself is very unsophisticated and incomplete from a legal standpoint, it creates huge problems.”
“At the end of the day, that means that whatever you want to do, you need to get approval from, I would say, at least eight ministries,” the Hoiana general counsel said.
An example provided by Mr Mesquita de Melo was related to Vietnam’s pilot programme allowing locals to gamble at designated casinos. In the country, casino gambling is currently only permitted for foreign passport holders.
The only operational property included in the programme permitting Vietnamese citizens to gamble, Corona Resort & Casino in Phu Quoc, announced in December it would “temporarily suspend” the scheme on January 1 “until further notice”.
“We have really no insight into what the government is going to do with regard to local gaming,” Mr Mesquita de Melo said.
Singapore’s ‘gold standard’, Macau’s challenges
Also present at the panel was Kok-Keng Lau (pictured right), partner at Rajah & Tann Singapore LLP. He noted that Singapore’s gambling regulatory landscape was “probably one of the most stringent in the world”.
“We are widely regarded as having arguably set the ‘gold standard’ for gambling regulation,” he added.
According to him, one reason for the city-state’s tight regulation is the fact that, “unlike other regulated gambling markets around the world, Singapore does not seek market expansion.”
Pedro Cortés (pictured second left), managing partner at the Macau-based Lektou Law Firm, discussed the regulatory challenges faced by Macau as its gaming industry transitions from a VIP-centric model to one in which the mass market takes precedence.
He noted that, from a regulatory and compliance standpoint, the focus is no longer on monitoring VIP rooms, but instead on overseeing casino cashiers and cages. Operators “need to monitor lower-value, but high-volume” transactions, he said.
Mr Cortés suggested that casinos could use technology to assist in monitoring this type of activity, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.
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