Levo Chan arrested in Macau for illegal gambling operations

Levo Chan Weng-lin, the husband of Taiwanese Actress Ady Ann Yi-xuan, is reportedly arrested in Macau for illegal gambling operations.

He was one of the two who have been arrested in follow-up investigations regarding Alvin Chau Cheok-wa, the former chairman of Macau casino junkets operator Suncity Group Holdings who was arrested last November for establishing illegal casinos in the mainland and attracting punters to bet overseas. 

Macau judicial police announced on Sunday that two more people were arrested in a hotel in Nape district. They have been charged with organizing illegal gambling, money laundering and running a criminal syndicate.

One is a 49-year-old man surnamed Chan, while another is a 39-year-old surnamed Choi. Both of them are Macau residents.

The older man controlled the criminal syndicate, while the younger one assisted him, Macau police said without naming anyone. Chan was identified as Levo Chan in media reports.

Officers seized computers, servers, hard discs, documents and HK$4.1 million in cash in the suspects' homes in Cotai and in their offices.

Macau police said the November and latest operations targeted different syndicates, but evidences show they break similar laws.

The two arrested did not respond to police questions during investigations.

Wenzhou authorities said last year their investigation had found that Chau formed a junket agent network in the mainland to help citizens engage in offshore and cross-border gambling activities.

Chau also set up an asset management company in the mainland to help gamblers make cross-border fund transfers, according to the Wenzhou City Public Security Bureau.

The Supreme People's Procuratorate -- China's highest prosecution office -- said mainland authorities have prosecuted 63,238 individuals in over 25,000 cases of illegal casinos on the mainland from January to September last year.

Criminals have made use of online card games or mobile applications to sugarcoat such illegal gambling operations, disguising it as a form of entertainment to entrap people into gambling, the procuratorate said.

It said overseas elements were involved in most of these cases, with the criminals recruiting locals as proxies to enable mainlanders to place bets online.