VAN PAK LEN, Laos – Rising from the muddy fields on the Mekong riverbank in Laos, a lotus tops a casino in a sprawling city which analysts decry as a centre for cybercrime.
Shabby, mismatched facades –- including an Iberian-style plaza replete with a church tower, turrets and statues — stand alongside high-rise shells.
The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone is the most prominent of more than 90 such areas established across the Mekong region in recent years, often offering people reduced taxes or government regulation.
Traffic signs in the GTSEZ are in Chinese script, while everything from cigarettes to jade and fake Christian Dior bags are sold in China’s yuan.
Analysts say the towers are leased out as centres operating finance and romance scams online, a multibillion-dollar industry that shows no signs of abating despite Beijing-backed crackdowns in the region.
The GTSEZ was set up in 2007, when the Laos government granted the Kings Romans Group a 99-year lease on the area.
Ostensibly an urban development project to attract tourists with casinos and resorts, away from official oversight international authorities and analysts say it quickly became a centre for money laundering and trafficking.
The city has now evolved, they say, into a cybercrime hub that can draw workers from around the world with better-paying jobs than back home.
Laundry hung out to dry on the balconies of one high-rise building supposed to be a tourist hotel, while the wide and palm-lined boulevards were eerily quiet.
It is a “juxtaposition of the grim and the bling”, according to Richard Horsey of the International Crisis Group.
