The government announced that it will establish a special tribunal to investigate Shwe Koko, a large, Chinese-backed casino resort planned for the Thai-Myanmar border. The tribunal will investigate allegations of law violations and under-the-table deals that have plagued the project since it launched in 2017.
Thura Swiss first reported on the project in an article in early April. Shwe Koko, a.k.a. the Yatai New City Project, is a partnership between Hong Kong-listed Yatai International Holdings Group and the semi-autonomous Kayin State Border Guard Force. Watchdog groups claim it lacks transparency and accountability and threatens community lands and ethnic Kayin communities. In April, a report by the Karen Peace Support Network, titled “Gambling Away Our Land”, claimed that the Shwe Koko project violates several development laws and exploits loose regulations in Myanmar’s frontier. Later that month, the United States Institute of Peace, an organization funded by the U.S. government, listed Shwe Koko among three border projects that “present a range of concerns for Karen State, Myanmar as a whole, and more broadly, Myanmar’s relations with the rest of the world.” The report continued: “They include individuals with a deep history of involvement in known triads—Chinese organized crime groups—active in the U.S. and now expanding into Myanmar’s Karen State, bringing criminal activity to the heart of Myanmar’s peace process.”
U Tin Myint, who will head the tribunal, said the tribunal will especially address the presence of gambling on the site. A law was enacted last year to legalize gambling in Myanmar, but only for foreigners, and even then it is tightly regulated. “Casino businesses are not allowed so far in Shwe Koko. Let me be clear about this: we have not allowed any gambling activities in that area officially,” the Irrawaddy quoted Tin Myint as saying. Nevertheless, illegal casinos have operated on the Thai and Chinese borders for years. The Karen State Border Guard Force in particular has been responsible for several openly-operating riverside casinos in the city of Myawaddy.
