MANILA, Philippines—The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp (Pagcor) will come out with a set of rules to monitor suspicious transactions even after casinos have been excluded from the coverage of the recently amended Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA).
Pagcor vice president for gaming and licensing development Francis Hernando said the state-gaming firm has started drafting the rules that could be implemented starting September this year.
“There will be a set of rules. We’re actually developing a set of rules in time for the opening of Solaire,” Hernando told Senate reporters, referring to Bloomberry’s Solaire Manila Resorts and Casio, one of four license holders of Pagcor’s Entertainment City project.
“Our casino regulations and part of those casino regulations will touch on monitoring transactions that may be deemed to be say suspicious under the AMLA,’ he said.
A proposal requiring casinos to report suspicious transactions was rejected by Congress when it approved early this month a bill that seeks to strengthen the AMLA.
Despite this, Hernando said Pagcor would police its own to strengthen its regulatory power and be at par with international standards.
“I think if we want to be international class and recognized worldwide, we have to police ourselves properly,” he said.
“We’d like to hopefully be recognized as a serious jurisdiction internationally. The way Macau and Singapore and Las Vegas, New Jersey, Australia do it, there is a formal set of rules that is applied to everybody for a level playing field,” said Hernando.
“The rules are predictable, there are set sanctions for certain infractions and we’ve all put this and codified these into a manual. And that manual that’s under development. The first draft has already been approved by our board and we’re hoping that the formal form will be finished by September,” Hernando added.