Perth Casino Royal Commission: Ex casino chief denies ‘junket favour for mates’ amid money laundering reports

The tangled web weaved by WA’s former chief casino officer Mick Connolly and his Crown Perth mates has been further exposed – with evidence that he loosened rules around big spending junket operators at exactly the same time as he was planning a skydiving trip with his casino buddies. Mr Connolly’s close ties to Crown compliance bosses Josh Preston, Paul Hulme and Claude Marais has been a major focus of the Crown Perth Royal Commission so far – with emails showing they even nicknamed each other after characters in Gilligan’s Island. Today, the whiff around those friendships became a stench, with evidence about the decision in 2017 – eventually taken by Connolly alone – to relax the regulations around high-rolling gamblers coming to Perth from Asia. Various media reports had already surfaced about the very real possibility of those gamblers using Crown casino to launder millions in dirty money. In early 2017, both federal financial watchdog AUSTRAC, and a state government compliance officer, had both told Mr Connolly clearly that junkets could be a major criminal problem. That compliance officer even gave Mr Connolly examples — pointing to the Neptune junket, which had links to Cheung Chi-tai — previously named in court as a leader of the Wo Hop To triad gang. But just days before that report arrived, Crown had written to Mr Connolly requesting a rewrite to the rules which would mean they would not have to supply the names and details of junket operators to the State’s gambling regulator. And also at the same time, Mr Connolly was arranging one of his regular fishing trips with the Crown crew, this time to Jurien Bay – where a skydiving adventure was also going to take place. That trip eventually had to be re-arranged. Mr Connolly – using powers delegated to him by the Gaming and Waging Commission – also then rearranged the State’s casino manual, which meant the details of the junket players coming into WA did not have to go to the GWC. When asked whether he had done that as a favour for Mr Hulme, the former chief casino officer stated: “Absolutely not”. He also stated his firm belief was that overwatching junkets was the job of Australian Border Force, who granted the visas. But information from AUSTRAC, supplied to Mr Connolly later that year, told him that to rely on border force was fraught – because they were relying on potential criminals coming to Australia to ‘self-declare’ and were not getting police checks on them. That information never got to the GWC. Mr Connolly denied he had been “wilfully hiding” it from them. He also said a planned compliance review into junkets coming to Perth was never done, and still hasn’t been. He also denied that was anything to do with his friendships with the top legal and compliance officers at Crown Perth. The evidence continues.