GGRAsia – Lawyer flags doubts about opaque Macau tender weighting

Lawyer flags doubts about opaque Macau tender weighting

Oct 07, 2022 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

An absence of information on what weight the Macau government will give to its stated criteria when assessing the applicants for its gaming-concessions public tender “can cast a shadow” over the process, says Macau-based lawyer António Lobo Vilela.

The Macau authorities have said they hope to start six fresh, 10-year concessions in January 2023.

Mr Vilela was a senior legal advisor to the first gaming tender to be instituted by the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR), in 2001. For a number of years up to the end of 2020 he was a senior advisor to the city’s Secretary for Economy and Finance, the official who oversees the city’s casino industry.

In an opinion article in the October edition of Macau Business magazine, Mr Vilela states that – due to the fact there are seven applicants for only six concessions in the fresh tender process – there was room for the “serious possibility” that an unsuccessful applicant would seek judicial review in Macau’s Court of Second Instance, regarding the tender outcome.

The newcomer is GMM Ltd, linked to Genting Malaysia Bhd. According to Mr Vilela, the existence of a new company vying for a Macau licence requires “an initial (new and complete) suitability assessment process for the bidder that had never operated in Macau,” which could “prolong a tender that the Macau government anticipated would be (too) swift”.

New criteria, relative to what was asked of bidders in the last gaming public tender, include: bidders’ plans for expanding the number of clients from foreign markets; their proposed investment in non-gaming projects; and the social responsibilities they intend to assume.

Mr Vilela observed that the tender documents were “silent” regarding the “relative weight” of the various criteria in terms of how applicants create what the tender calls “the most advantageous conditions” for the Macau SAR.

He wrote: “This fact led to (at least) two requests for clarification to the tender commission by the bidders…”

Mr Vilela asserted that the commission said in a Portuguese-language version of its reply, that the relevant weighting would be “defined in due course, so that the respective information will not be provided to the bidders”.

He cited information said to have come from the commission, but which had not previously been put into the public domain.

The bidders are already in the negotiation phase of the public tender process. However, noted Mr Vilela, “the Macau government did not consider it appropriate to define the ‘weighting coefficient and the calculation mechanism’ before that time”.

The lawyer said the lack of information on weighting made it possible for the judging panel to “arbitrarily reorder the criteria” and the “relative importance of each”, thus “allowing the jury to select the proposals or choose the bidders as it sees fit”.