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PROMISE: Congress candidate Babush has made a U-turn on his promise that he will get rid of the casinos from the Mandovi river within 100 days of being elected as the MLA from Panjim constituency

Casino Pride: BEST CASINO FOR FAMILY - See 251 traveler reviews, 56 candid photos, and great deals for Panjim, India, at Tripadvisor. Casino Pride 2 Goa Owner Name, frank gould poker, casino at woodbine toronto, easy casino profits roulette system. He worked aboard Caravela, India’s first casino ship, brought to Goa in 2001 by Advani Hotels and Resorts. Mody, he remembers, was a regular. “He loved to gamble but only took measured risks.”.

BY RAJAN NARAYAN

Last week’s cover story carrying the photographs of candidates and rating them has brought a lot of accusations. I have been accused of taking money from the candidates. Journalism in Goa has become so corrupt that people cannot distinguish between honest analysis and fake news.

The problem with politicians is that they change their stand on key issues more often than we change our clothes on a hot summer day. Last week Babush Monserrate had promised to remove the casinos from the Mandovi river within 100 days of getting elected. Within two days of our publishing his promise he changed his mind. Clearly the casino lobby has again dramatized that it owns Goa and that every party in the state is in their pockets. They have become such a big monster that nobody can oppose them.
Parrikar had repeatedly promised to get the casinos out of the Mandovi river. But was unable to do so because Jaidev Modi, who owns the Deltin group, is very close to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. The casino lobby has become so strong that the owners of the Pride casinos are building a mammoth eight-storey building on a quiet residential four-metre-wide street in the Bay View area in Doan Paula, for their staff/guests. Long-time residents who question how permissions were granted for such a structure (that will definitely usher in traffic and parking problems and quite possibly water woes as well) are conveniently ignored.
When Babush has asked why he had changed his mind about the casinos he is reported to have replied that lots of Goan boys and girls will lose their jobs. Not to mention the taxi drivers and the city hotels losing their business. But the ground reality is that the majority of the employees of the casinos are Nepalis. Indeed Rohan Khaunte has discovered that 800 Nepalis working for Casino Pride had registered themselves as voters in the Porvorim constituency where they have been provided with accommodation. If Babush cannot, or will not, move the casinos out, nobody will. The best suggestion was made by the late Manohar Parrikar — to convert the offshore casinos into onshore casinos and shift them to Mopa. But since the future of Mopa itself is in doubt and the south will not accept casinos in the river Sal, they are here to stay.

After the suspension of mining and slowing down of tourism, particularly charter tourism, casinos are the biggest contributors to the revenue of the State. So no party, whether Congress or BJP, is likely to touch the casinos.
Which brings us back to the question of whom to vote for. In his interview with Goan Observer Subhash Velingkar came across as a very decent person. As someone who will not indulge in corruption. If he has the power, Velingkar might be the only one of the horses in the race who would throw the casinos out.
Velingkar’s main plank is to decongest Panjim by taking all the government offices out of it. The permanently resident population of Panjim is probably less than 15,000. But Panjim attracts over 50,00 people a day to various departments of government including the passport office and the office of the civil registrar. Even though the Secretariat has been shifted from the Adil Shah palace to Porvorim, a lot of offices, including the courts, are in Panjim. There are plans to shift the High Court and the district courts to Merces. Velingkar would like other departments like the Collector’s office, the Directorate of Accounts and even police HQ, to be shifted out of Panjim.
Velingkar who grew up near the Mahalaxmi temple believes that if all the government offices are shifted to Merces or Porvorim there will be much less traffic congestion and Panjim will return to being a peaceful city.
The problem is that although the Saraswats will vote for Velingkar not a single member of the minority community will. This is because he is adamant on withdrawing grants to English primary mediums schools run by the church.
Nobody off course will vote for Sidharth. He has made a mess of the ‘Smart City’ project which has been digging up Panjim long after the deadline. April 30 was the deadline for digging roads to start maintenance work to prepare for the monsoon. There are also charges of corruption against Sidharth. The people of Panjim are tired of 25 years of degeneration under BJP rule anyway, and any BJP votes will go to Subhash Velingkar who headed the RSS before he split with Parrikar.
The only choice is Valmiki. Valmiki in the tradition of AAP has sworn in an affidavit that if he wins the election he will not join the BJP. Which is very commendable given that Vishwajit Rane joined the saffron brigade soon after the BJP form the government and two other Congress MLAs, Subhash Shirodkar and Dayanand Sopte, joined the BJP later.
This is the first time any candidate has given an affidavit that he will not do party hopping and we hope this becomes more common.
The problem is that people have lost their enthusiasm for the AAP. The party has done very good work in Delhi. Recently it proved that it had improved the quality of government schools which is reflected in HSSC results of over 80%. The AAP has started ‘Urban Health Centres’ which really work, unlike Goa’s Primary Health Centres. AAP has even brought down the power tariffs in New Delhi.
Unfortunately none of the achievements of AAP are known to Goans. Even if Goans are aware of the good work AAP has done, they may not vote for Valmiki thinking that since he had declared that he won’t join the BJP, he won’t be part of the government.
AAP can do things in Delhi because it has almost 90% if majority in the assembly. Even if Valmiki is elected he will not be able to achieve much as he will be the only AAP MLA in the Assembly. For people with a conscience the choice is between the devil and the saffron brigade.

A floating casino off Panaji in Goa. Credit: Devika Sequeira

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Panaji: Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar recently made an announcement in the state’s legislative assembly: all offshore casinos would have to shift to land-based operations within three years if they wanted to continue doing business in Goa. The decision, long expected despite the stock denials, is what the big players in the casino industry had been betting on all along, and it exposes the BJP’s doublespeak on the gambling business in Goa.

There are currently six offshore and ten land-based casinos in play here, but live gaming (with dealers opposed to slot machines), where the stakes can go really high, is permitted only on the floating casinos, which makes the transfer and renewal of their licences such a lucrative business.

Jaydev Mody’s Delta Corp Ltd is the biggest player in the Goa casino business. It runs three offshore casinos, Deltin Royale, Deltin Jaqk and Deltin Caravela as well as the onshore Deltin Suites Casino Hotel at Nerul. The Ashok Khetrapal fronted group is the next big casino operator with Casino Pride and Casino Pride 2 anchored in the Mandovi. Pride also runs the land-based Casino Paradise at Porvorim and Casino Palms at Baga.

Faced with mounting protests over the BJP government granting permission for a sixth offshore casino in the River Mandovi after the party had earlier campaigned against them, a providential occurrence spared Parrikar’s blushes in the monsoon session of the Goa assembly. On July 15, a new casino vessel M. V. Lucky Seven, fully outfitted to commence business as the Big Daddy Casino, drifted off course in stormy weather and ran aground at Miramar beach (near Panaji) where it is currently stuck, turning into a photo-op for tourists. Operations to refloat and tow it away are currently underway.

Lucky Seven is promoted by the controversial former Haryana minister Gopal Kanda. The Tanzanian flag passenger vessel was brought to Goa by Golden Globe Hotels Pvt Ltd (GGHPL), a company started as a subsidiary of Kanda’s defunct MDLR airline. There’s very little information to be found on GGHPL or its businesses, but sources in the company said that Kanda, his son and son-in-law hold a majority stake in it and in their current interest in the casino business in Goa.

Kanda’s foray into casinos here goes back to 2009 when he bought the Leela group’s Casino Rio for a reported amount of Rs 30 crore. Leela had managed an offshore gaming licence in 2006 but the business never set sail. Neither did it under Kanda, and in 2013 the government towed away the abandoned vessel for owing the authorities Rs 12 crore in casino licence fees. The fee with fines had mounted to Rs 50 crore by 2017. This in itself should have been grounds enough to not renew Kanda’s licence. But the Parrikar government renewed it all the same, using the ruse of a court order to justify the decision. In reality, however, it was the state’s advocate general who told the high court of Bombay at Goa that the government would “favourably consider” the Kanda company’s application for renewal.

All the casino licences in Goa – both off-shore and land based ones – were dished out by gung-ho Congress governments, with former chief minister Pratapsingh Rane and former home minister Ravi Naik being the key players in this high stakes game of licence roulette. This uncomfortable fact, as much as the Congress’ role in the mining scam, provided the BJP its biggest ammunition for the 2012 state assembly election which it won with a clear majority. Parrikar would turn up at anti-casino protests with RSS supporters, and doing away with casinos went to the top of his party’s 2012 manifesto, even as behind the scenes assurances were reportedly given that they would be allowed to carry on with business as usual.

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Once in government though, the commitment by the BJP to move the casinos out of the Mandovi and regulate the trade was never seen through. The promise to set up a gaming commission has not seen the light of day even five years later. What the government did in effect, is facilitate more opaque operations, allowing the state’s Captain of Ports, rather than the Centre’s Director of Shipping – as was the case previously – to licence the casino vessels, most of which are not even seaworthy. In 2014, the BJP also reversed the law it had brought in to ban the transfer of casino licences when it allowed the Pride group to take over the V. M. Salgaocar & Bro Pvt Ltd owned Casino Carnival. The government collected a fee of Rs 5 crore for the transfer, and the deal went through for an unconfirmed amount of Rs 80 crore.

More recently, Parrikar has argued that casinos have brought jobs, revenue and also enhanced the state’s tourism industry. Doing away with them would hurt investor sentiment. Though he was “serious” in his “opposition to casinos”, it was the government’s duty “to ensure there is continuity in policies,” he told the Goa House. Parrikar bolstered his arguments with figures of revenue earned from casinos: a total of Rs 743 crore was collected over the last three years from commercial taxes and licence fees paid to the home department.

But how close is this to their actual takings?

Inconsistency and flip flops have been the hallmark of government policy on casinos in Goa. The intended confusion has not only encouraged, but practically endorsed an unregulated conduct of the business, and allows politicians to collect a “recurring monthly fee”, as a casino operator puts it. The government currently charges between Rs 10 crore to Rs 12 crore as a yearly fee for off-shore gaming, depending on the passenger capacity of the vessels. Land-based casinos pay Rs 4 crore a year. But industry observers say this is peanuts in the serious gambling business, given there’s no authority to monitor operations or even determine the number of footfalls.

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On any given night, the streets of Panaji, near the city’s jetty, are packed with parked vehicles – a visible hindrance to those who live in the area. This no doubt is clear proof of how busy the casinos are. While the bigger vessels pack up to 1500 gambling enthusiasts a day in what’s become 24×7 operations, particularly over the weekends, the smaller vessels crowd in some 800-1000 passengers, says the source. The over-crowding has been overlooked for years.

The principle reason for bringing in floating casinos – the Congress had argued when it allowed the first one here in 2001 – was to keep the gambling off limits to locals. A kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind policy. An attempt by the Parrikar government to ban the entry of locals in the casinos has never been seriously implemented either. In 2012, Parrikar had brought in major amendments to the Goa Public Gambling Act, 1976 to ban the transfer of casino licences – it was then revoked by his government in 2014). Only tourists with valid permits were to be allowed, not locals, but no such permits were ever issued, nor are IDs asked of anyone walking into a casino.

Under the BJP government, Delta Corp was also given a dedicated jetty for its offshore operations in Betim. Mody, who is a familiar figure in Goa, was among the front-benchers at the swearing in ceremony of the new government at Raj Bhavan in March this year, after the BJP’s controversial takeover of power. The Delta Corp chairman now also owns FC Goa, after he bought a 65% stake in the football team that was jointly held by Dattaraj Salgaocar and Srinivas Dempo.

All we’ve learnt so far from the chief minister’s assurances in the state assembly is that a “comprehensive policy” on casinos will be out within three months and that offshore casinos would be moved to a “designated entertainment zone” on land within three years. Sources in the industry said they’d been told they would have to put up high-end casino hotels at Mopa, North Goa, where Goa’s controversial new greenfield airport is to come up. The BJP and its recent ally Goa Forward – whose ambitious leader Vijai Sardesai has also done a U-turn on casinos – no doubt see the move as politically and economically advantageous. It would help them justify the construction of the new project as well as give the casino industry in Goa a permanent base. But will it go down well with the public?