NRI casino king’s kingdom crumbles

Dec 29, 2010 |

IANS

Kathmandu, Dec. 28: A billion-dollar gambling industry built up in Nepal by a chartered accountant from New Delhi, which encompassed seven casinos and employed nearly 7,000 people, has been left tottering with legislators on Tuesday ordering the government to scrap their licence unless they cleared their dues within 30 days.

The Public Accounts Committee of Nepal’s interim Parliament on Tuesday issued the directive to Mr Kishore Thapa, secretary at the tourism and civil aviation ministry, after grilling him last week over the casinos’ growing failure to pay the royalty it owes the state, now estimated to be about NRS 193 million.

Mr Rakesh Wadhwa, a Xaverian from Kolkata and former runner of casinos in Sri Lanka, was not available for comments on the unravelling of his kingdom.

He has been incommunicado since November, after the casinos came under fire, and skipped even the launch of his own novel, The Dealmaker published by Rupa. Currently, he is believed to have fled Nepal.

The 53-year-old heads Nepal Recreation Centre (NRC), the organisation that had a monopoly on the casino industry in the 1990s, when Nepal was still a kingdom and the royal family had a stake in the industry. At that time however NRC was ruled by an American, Mr Richard Tuttle, who took Mr Rakesh, then a chartered accountant working with a five-star hotel in Kathmandu, under his wing.

By 2007, the relationship between the two had changed dramatically with Mr Wadhwa routing his mentor and establishing his control over NRC and the casino kingdom.

However, the controversial victory was short-lived with another powerful player entering the stage.

It was Raj Bahadur Singh, the son-in-law of deposed King Gyanendra, who threw out NRC from one of the best-known casinos — the Casino Royale from which Charles Sobhraj was arrested in 2003 — for non-payment of rent to the Yak and Yeti hotel whose premises it had leased. Mr Singh then began running the casino himself.

Soon another hotel, the Shangri-la, sued NRC for non-payment of rent and won the long legal battle. Now the hotel says it will throw out NRC from the Casino Shangri-la operating from its premises and will run the gaming centre itself. Mr Wadhwa is left with only four casinos: Casino Nepal, the oldest casino in the country and where Dev Anand shot some of the scenes of Hare Krishna Hare Ram, Casino Anna, Casino Tara and Casino Everest.

Casino Tara too remains under a cloud with reports about the Hyatt Regency hotel, whose grounds the casino operates from, also seeking to evict it.

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