Cooks officials tight-lipped

Economy

Cooks officials tight-lipped on Internet Casino deal

By Lisa Williams

Computerised gambling via an

Internet Casino is soon to come to the Cook Islands, but no one in the Cooks - or New Zealand, for that matter, - will be allowed to play.

The Cooks government made the ban on local bets a condition of its approval for the casino, amid worries over addic tion to betting on the Net. Offshore interests gained conditional approval from the government to operate in the Cooks as far back as October last year on the condition that Cook Island resi dents could not place bets or wagers of any kind with the casino.

But officials are keeping tight-lipped about the deal with Casinos of the South Pacific Ltd, an offshore company oper ating under the tight secrecy protecting the Cooks International Companies set up. A mystery figure behind the CSP Ltd has yet to make a public debut, despite being in touch with journalists both here and in New Zealand. Monetary Board head Tai Nicholas says he can’t comment on the matter.

Cooks Telecommunications head Stuart Davis confirmed a company had leased circuit capacity off TCI to operate an Internet Casino, but maintained the client confidentiality argument and could not give any details. Speaking for CSP Ltd in the Cooks, local lawyer Brett Gibson did the same, adding he could not go into details of how the technology would work against local bets.

He says there will be an Internet ‘bar’ on punters coming out of the Cooks, and New Zealanders will also be excluded from using the facility.

Gibson did go one better than anyone else in the Cooks on the Casino deal - he got his client to make a statement on the project, reassuring Cook Islanders soured by many a government scheme that this one, as they say, is the genuine article even if the only involvement from Cook Islanders with the Cook Casino will be via work done by Cook Islanders employed as computer technicians and assistant staff, processing bets and data.

Other benefits to the Cook Islands will be increased revenue through the Offshore Fnancial Centre. But there were no projections provided. Bets will only be accepted from countries where it is legal ly permissible to do so, says the company.

It’s planned most betting in the casino will come from Asian and European mar kets. Still, even without government inter vention, the International Companies Act under which CSP Ltd is registered, states it is illegal for any international company to deal with Cook Island residents. It’s understood legal technicalities also brought the bar down on Kiwi punters.

The announcement of New Zealanders not having access to the casino will be welcome to Internal Affairs officials there, worried that the new global gam bling technology would cost hundreds of millions to the country in lost duties, taxes, and financial support for charity.

A report into the impact of technology on new and existing forms of gaming in New Zealand estimates that between SNZBSO million (SUSS6B million) and SNZ3.4 billion (SUS 2.3 billion) could eventually be spent on gaming through “information networks”, including the Internet.

Gibson says for commercially sensi tive reasons his client did not want to be named, but an NZPA report this week cited an American man telling New Zealand journalists he’s moving to the Cook Islands to organise the Internet Casino. The man, who has previously had a casino ‘site’ on the World Wide Web based in the United States, declined to have his name published in New Zealand.

Gibson says the opening of the casino here by the incorporated company is still a few months away - the statement says the promoters of the company had looked at jurisdictions throughout the world, and

“have chosen to set up in the Cook Islands due to the stability of the gov ernment and the quality of its legisla tion”. Betting via the Internet may soon be a ho-hum thing for gamblers of the future, but the problems of the technol ogy have to be worked through with current punters.

In Australia the forecast is that one in every four dollars spent in that country’s megabucks gaming industry will soon be channelled into gambling through on-line networks. But what potential punters wanting to taste the technology are keen to find out is: How will money be moved? How does one place a bet or collect winnings? Then there is the legality of placing a simple bet or wager in a ‘global’ casino where customers with credit-card numbers fret over the possibility of having their card details

hijacked by hackers, or Internet ‘pirates’ robbing the unwary travellers on the new

Information Superhighway.

How the process of placing bets and wagers will affect laws of different coun tries, and how the casino system will monitor where bets originate before accepting them is one question operators posed when the idea first came to promi nence last year. The choice of places like the Cooks, where offshore companies can operate casinos, does away with problems encountered in the US, where laws on gaming vary from state to state.

An American law from the 60s also makes it illegal to use a wire that crosses a state or national boundary to transmit information to aid in the placing of bets.

But if the casinos set up offshore, linked to the Internet only by phone lines or satellites, casino operators might get away with it, says one US expert in gam

bling law.

“The political reality is that if you’re a foreign operator sitting in a foreign coun try, your risk of being arrested by the United States is fairly small,” he says. “It doesn’t mean it’s legal. It just means your chances of being arrested are very slim.”

The company behind the Cook Islands casino has made it clear it will not accept bets from countries where it is illegal to do so. Just how that monitoring system will operate on a global information net work such as the Internet, where rules are reinvented as fast as the technology re defines our ideas on information, remains to be seen. ■