Alvin Chau, the leader of the illegal gambling industry in Macau, was found guilty on more than 100 counts and given an 18-year prison term.
The 48-year-old was found guilty in a case involving illegal bets totaling HK$823.7 billion ($105 billion; £85.7 billion).
Chau, a well-known and colourful figure in the neighbourhood casino business, had refuted the accusations.
Only one Chinese city—Macau, a former Portuguese colony—allows casino gambling.
Chau was the chairman and founder of Suncity Group. It was Macau’s biggest operator of junkets, or organised trips for wealthy gamblers to casinos.
It arranged for high rollers from mainland China to travel to Macau and gamble in the city’s casinos, and offered loans to them. It also collected debts for casinos, and operated VIP rooms across Macau’s casinos.
The businessman, nicknamed “Junket King,” resigned in December 2021, days after his arrest.
Prosecutors had accused Chau of creating and leading a criminal syndicate that had facilitated undeclared bets. They said that as a result the government lost more than HK$8.26 billion in tax income.
The court ruled in favour of the prosecutors for most of the charges, but acquitted Chau of money laundering. The high-profile case also involves 20 other defendants.
The gambling industry has been hit hard by coronavirus restrictions as well as a crackdown by the Chinese government’s on money being moved out of the mainland.
In September, a court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou jailed more than 30 people for cross-border gambling in connection with Chau’s case.
Suncity shut all of its VIP rooms after Chau’s arrest. But even before that the number of junkets in Macau had been on constant decline. There are now only 36 junket operators left, down from 100 in 2019, according to official figures.
With his slicked-back hair and tanned skin, Chau is a well-known figure in the Chinese-speaking world and a favourite among tabloids which have focused on his love affairs.
Local media labeled him “Washing Rice Wa” after a sitcom character, though the name can also be seen as an euphemism for money laundering.