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TAIWAN
AMZ Holdings and the
Taiwan adventure
With legislative changes afoot in Taiwan for regulated gaming on the
islands, AMZ Holdings has a significant lead on any companies
wishing to invest in the area, with a large quantity of beachside land
on Penghu just waiting for the go-ahead. Casino International found
out what the changes will mean to AMZ and for the gaming industry.
A
couple of years ago we interviewed economic situation worldwide, gaming is seen as one
members of AMZ Holdings about their of the low-hanging fruits… On various election
complex land acquisition on Penghu, a promises the Government decided to move ahead
time-consuming and incredibly with the whole gaming scenario and to get the
complicated series of deals that had never gaming bill passed.
been attempted before. The company had its eyes
fixed firmly on the future, with the potential for CI: When we talked previously, we discussed the
gaming on Penghu a real possibility, and that difficulty in acquiring land parcels because of
optimism and careful judgement looks like it has been how ownership works in the Islands; that took a
vindicated with the recent announcement about long time to sort out, so have you actually
legislative changes in Taiwan. Domestically, there is developed the land yet?
potentially a huge gaming market as the Taiwanese are CB: We haven’t started building yet. The island, like
Macau's second-greatest visitors after the Chinese. any island, is obviously short on land, the majority of
Chief Executive Office Michael Treanor and Carl it is held by families and we had to accumulate these
Burger, Executive Vice President of AMZ Holdings small pockets of land into one large piece.
spoke with Casino International to explain more… Our land comprises Central Government, Local
Government and private land; over the last three
Casino International: Obviously the years or so we’ve had to get the land re-zoned. We’ve
development with Taiwanese law related to had to take it from agricultural land – and in actual
gaming, it’s something you’ve been waiting for a fact we became peanut farmers in terms of our
while. How did it happen, can you give us some designation – then gradually work our way through a
history? re-zoning process and submission of various design
Carl Burger: Gaming legislation in Taiwan has been plans to our current status, which allows us to build a
in-progress since around 1999; someone decided fully-fledged five-star international resort on the land,
well, we want gaming but we don’t want it in our which is 27 acres or 11 hectares.
backyard so the best way to do this is to push it out We’ve got a building permit and the strategy has
to the offshore islands. At that time they were trying always been that we’d like to include gaming in the
to economically benefit the outer islands and they project, but it’s not in our best interests until we see
had an act called the Outer Islands Construction Act which way the Government wants to go regarding
which was designed to encourage investment onto gaming regulations. . We have everything ready to go
the outer islands, Penghu being one of them. The bill and that’s the situation as it stands at the moment;
at that time didn’t find too much favour so the anybody else coming in wanting to obtain private
gaming clause came out of it, but the bill of the outer land would pretty much have to take the same route
islands act does exist and it has real stipulations on as we did which is extremely laborious, await any
how to invest etc. local government land initiative which face the same
Roll forward six or seven years, the bill has been re- hurdles, or seek to do a deal with a qualified parcel
introduced a couple of times and failed, until the holder such as AMZ which will provide them a faster
present day, when the bill was actually passed, and it route to operations if bidding is successful.
passed for a number of reasons: there was a change
in Government this time last year – a new president CI: What’s the next step for AMZ?
came in who favoured gaming; clearly due to the CB: The issue that Taiwan has for gaming is that
24 MARCH 2009
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