Love Of Gambling Grips Malaysians

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31661, 23 April 1968, Page 22

Love Of Gambling Grips Malaysians

IN.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright!

KUALA LUMPUR.

If you see a group of people under a tree or a solitary figure praying at a shrine anywhere in Malaysia, its odds on they are gamblers.

For the passion for betting on anything has gripped the Malaysians of all races and creeds by the million, and gambling has become big business. Someone among the group waiting under a tree stands to win a big amount. The person at the shrine hopes that a winning lottery number will be revealed to him. It is even said that the Prime Minister (Tunku Abdul Rahman) wanted to know the number of the aircraft in which the United States VicePresident (Mr Hubert Humphrey) arrived for a recent visit to Kuala Lumpur, so that he could use it to make a threedigit bet. Millions of Malaysian dollars are spent every year on both legal and illegal gambling.

being run with Government participation. Illegal lotteries, card games and hundreds of small and large betting syndicates probably attract several more millions of dollars in stakes. At almost any time of the day groups of labourers waiting for work can be seen playing cards to pass the time. Even children bet with matchsticks on a variety of games learned from thenelders.

Legal gambling brings in considerable revenue for the Government. The social welfare lottery, for instance, pays 10 per cent in tax and spends another 20 per cent or more on welfare services.

The totalisator pays 10, 15 and 20 per cent in tax, depending on the type of betting, while the football pools pay 25 per cent of gross takings in tax, apart from the fact that the Government has a 40 per cent shareholding in the promotion company.

Race meeting totalisators turn over more than $3O million a year, and this does not include the big sweeps run by the racing clubs at each meeting. The nation’s welfare lottery, drawn 18 times a year and offering a first prize of $400,000, attracts nearly ssom. Now another legal form of gambling has sprung up—the football pools, based on British soccer results. Designed to stop * yearly outflow of s2m to Britain, it is believed to be attracting considerably more than that because it is