Name: 中国のカジノがいかにしてアメリカの一片を征服したか (How a Chinese Casino Conquered a Piece of America)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:53:13.000Z
Duration: 13 min 31 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

程度の副詞

but it has been part of an American territory

called the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

which is probably the nearest place that most people have heard of.

Administratively, it's kind of similar to Puerto Rico.

And it's had a kind of troubled economic history,

never really finding an industry that makes sense to keep its economy going.

But a few years ago, it entered an agreement with a Chinese company to construct a huge casino.

Really massive, a kind of Macau sized development

out there in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.

And after that things got, things got pretty weird.

I am a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

all about the investment of a Chinese casino on the island of Saipan.

Actually what had happened was a colleague of mine in Asia

who covers the casino business had heard of this place,

because the company that was operating this casino called Imperial Pacific based in Hong Kong

was reporting its numbers to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

And the numbers that were being put up in Saipan were absolutely astonishing.

at a casino that was on this Island, truly in the middle of nowhere.

Imperial Pacific is actually a little bit mysterious in its origins.

We know that it is controlled by a mother and son from Harbin in Northern China.

They seemed to have earned their money initially

on the mainland in a number of businesses, particularly real estate.

And then they came to Macau where they got involved in what are called junkets,

which are these mechanisms by which Chinese nationals gamble in Macau

and often as another consequence they are able to move money out of the country.

So when Saipan began looking into whether a casino could be the answer to its economic problems,

Imperial Pacific showed up and very quickly won an approval and a very generous deal

to construct this casino and to then operate it without paying a great deal in tax.

There was a big problem from the beginning of Imperial Pacific's project in Saipan,

which was that no one had ever built anything this large there.

It's kind of like a quiet American suburb.

And here was this Chinese company proposing to construct a Vegas or Macau sized installation

right in the middle of the city center of Saipan's largest town.

So they needed workers and where did they find those workers?

and this was something that was investigated by the US Federal government

were tourists, were Chinese nationals who had entered on tourist visas into Saipan

and had then gone straight to work at the construction site.

I spoke to one person who had worked as a site supervisor there in charge of implementing safety rules,

who said that it was the most difficult project he'd ever worked on

because basic safety requirements were not being followed.

And sure enough, there were a great deal of injuries.

And things actually got so bad that at the hospital in Saipan,

the doctors were keeping a kind of unofficial spreadsheet listing injuries from workers from the site

to keep track of how many patients they were seeing who had been hurt while working to build this casino.

So while I was in Saipan, I went and with the help of a colleague

who translated to see some of these construction workers

who were living in a sort of dormitory barracks-like structure, not so far from the casino.

They were angry. They were claiming that they had not been paid,

that they had been injured and not properly treated and really just aggrieved in every respect.

These workers were employed by a series of contractors

that Imperial Pacifc had hired to build its casino.

Imperial Pacific has said that it is in full compliance with all of these rules

that any issues, for example, around immigration and illegal labor being used on the construction site,

these things are being done without its knowledge.

They have also said safety violations, again,

were either done without their knowledge or that the site complied with all the relevant safety rules.

Imperial Pacific of course needed someone to actually run this casino

and I think it's fair to say it needed an American face.

It needed someone who could operate natively in an American context.

who had cut his teeth actually in the Trump organization in Trump casinos.

He's someone who has described Trump as a mentor or someone who was very influential on his career.

We are investing in the island, in the Chamorro culture here.

We are guests. Very honored and privileged to be here.

We will be here for many many years to come.

He was the face of it, appearing at meetings,

He then came back and then I believe he left again

One of the things that got me interested in this story was this astonishing list of

big name Washington political figures who Imperial Pacific had managed to collect over the years

as board members in some cases, advisers in other cases.

You had David Peterson, former governor of New York.

You had Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania.

One of the things that really struck me as I reached out to some of these people

was that they hadn't done much due diligence.

Rendell for example told us that essentially his assistant had Googled Imperial Pacific

and done a bit of online reading and he'd concluded from that,

this was an okay assignment for him to take, an okay check for him to take.

It's probably safe to say they were hired to provide a degree of air cover

that if you have people with these big names on the payroll

they can help you stay away from any regulatory or legal problems.

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中国のカジノがいかにしてアメリカの一片を征服したか (How a Chinese Casino Conquered a Piece of America)

eventually

structure

initially

territory