The man who tomorrow may become the 45th President of the United States once harboured a more modest, but potentially more profitable ambition: to be one of the gaming kings in Macau. To achieve this he even promised to permanently move the organization of the Miss Universe pageant to Macau.
In December 2001, when the Macau government announced the list of candidates for the opening of the gaming industry to new concessionaires, Donald Trump’s name was not obvious among the stakeholders. The list consisted of large Las Vegas casinos and entrepreneurs – Steve Wynn, MGM, Mandalay Bay, Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas Sands – but also several other consortia involving gambling operators from other countries (Britain, Monaco, South Africa, Malaysia) and businesspeople from Macau and Hong Kong. In all, there were 21 candidates for just three concessions, but with no reference to an investment from Atlantic City, where Trump had concentrated all his casinos at the time.
Soon after, it became known that Donald Trump, as project manager, was part of the proposal made by Sociedade Baía da Nossa Senhora da Esperança, which had as its main investors Macau-based Chinese businessman, Sio Tak Hong, owner of Hotel Fortuna and director of Nam Van Society, and Hong Kong billionaires, Joseph Lau and Nina Wang, who was then considered the richest woman in Asia.
The opening of the proposal to the committee of the international competition for the contract awarding of new concessions was made on 18 December, leading to the first phase of consultations on January 3rd 2002. Documents at the time show that the consortium that Donald Trump was linked to proposed to initially build a 5-star hotel, with 2,200 rooms, as well as a Convention and Exhibition Centre, a shopping mall, entertainment facilities and parking space, at an estimated investment of 2.5 billion patacas. A second phase would give rise to a second hotel with 4,000 rooms, at an estimated investment of 4.9 billion patacas.
The presentation of the project was left to entrepreneur Sio Tak Hong, it lasted less than an hour and was "absolutely disastrous" in the words of Jorge Costa Oliveira, one of the Macau officials who formed part of the contest committee.
The press at the time did not fail to pick up on it: The exclusion of the consortium for a second phase of consultation was "due mainly to the flop of its initial presentation," the January 25th 2002 edition of PONTO FINAL newspaper read. "Donald Trump did not come to Macau nor was he represented, and Sio Tak Hong, a partner at Van Nam, apparently did not know that the meeting was intended to show the competitor's plans," the article explained.
The bad example of Atlantic City
Although not part of the proposal as it was submitted to the competition, the consortium that Donald Trump was part of made a promise during the presentation of the project for "the greatest hotel in the world", upon completion of its 6000 rooms: "This is where the Miss Universe contest, now based in Atlantic City, will be organized", read another article in PONTO FINAL newspaper on the same subject. That is, in addition to sharing their experience in the area of gaming, Trump also advanced with a last minute boon, in the area of entertainment, promising to transfer to Macau the organization of the Miss Universe pageant.
According to the newspaper Las Vegas Review – also quoted at the time by PONTO FINAL, "Donald Trump was convinced that his name would be enough to secure one of the concessions in Macau, and when he understood that was not the case he was quick to show the committee tender, through interposed intermediaries, everything he had built in Atlantic City – hoping, naturally, that this would be enough to place him amongst the winners".
But it was not enough – and may even have been counterproductive.
In late 2001, the Macau officials connected to the gaming liberalization process were already convinced that the example to follow was that of Las Vegas, and never that of Atlantic City. The failure of the gambling capital model of the East Coast had become evident by its omission during an official visit of a Macau government delegation to the United States months earlier.
The visit ended up only including Washington DC, Las Vegas and a town nearby San Francisco, California, where there was a study of the opening of casinos on Indian reservations. On the initiative of the US government, Atlantic City, the centre of Donald Trump's empire, was left out of the trip, one crucial to the evolution of the liberalization process of the gaming industry in Macau.
Months later, when local journalists sought to investigate the chances of Donald Trump becoming one of the kings in the gaming industry in Macau, the response they received from officials at the highest level of the MSAR, was invariably this: "He is well known to us, but doesn’t understand anything about gaming."
