Gaming in Gaoming claim sends shares soaring

NOBODY knows where it is, but a casino is opening in Guangdong province on August 10.

That's the claim of a Canadian company called Advanced Gaming Technology, which last week told newspapers across Canada that it had signed an agreement to install and operate its electronic bingo machines in a parlour in a casino in Gaoming, in Guangdong province.

We think they mean Maoming, a large and slightly frontier town-like place near Hainan Island, famous for its oil refineries and frequent flooding, but it's difficult to be sure.

Anyhow, AGT told Bloomberg Business News that it would be 11,000 square feet of punting excitement, and the stock went up 60 per cent in a day.

We haven't been able to speak to AGT directly.

It's strange how little-known Canadian companies manage to land deals where, say, well-connected Hong Kong firms have failed.

For instance, quite a few people in Hong Kong got excited about an outfit called MTC Electronics last year, when it made a big fuss about getting an equity stake in a paging network in Dongguan. This was despite Beijing edicts that foreigners can't have an equity stake in mainland projects.

The share price took off, although we haven't noticed Dongguan becoming the pager centre of Guangdong province yet.

Meanwhile, half the directors are suing the other half over alleged abuse of the share option scheme and the company is having great difficulty producing any accounts.

Roman consul? WHEN we were talking about Bhutan on Saturday we forgot to mention that Honorary Consul for Bhutan in Hong Kong is Hari N Harilela.

There's a fresh diplomatic list out at the moment, packed full of people doing Honorary Consul's jobs like this.

It's particularly invaluable because it shows clearly which ones are available - there's no Honorary Consul for Oman, for instance, if anyone fancies the job.

And there are plenty of perfectly respectable countries which never seem to have created such a post. Nepal, Kenya and Bahrain, for instance.

More desperate types might try being Honorary Consul for the Spratley Islands or Atlantis.

According to the list, any Bhutanese in trouble who can't get hold of Hari Harilela should try Gobind Harilela, who is Honorary Vice-Consul.

Meanwhile Honorary Consul for the Maldives is Bob Harilela.

A friendly chap called Robert Lewington, a partner in law firm Masons, is Honorary Consul for Western Samoa, while Geoffrey Yeh Meon-tsen, of construction firm Hsin Chong Holdings is the chap looking after the interests of Jamaica.

Most fascinating of all, Barbados' Honorary Consul is that longtime friend of the West Indies, none other than Victor Li Tzar-kuoi, son of Li Ka-shing.

Good vibes NEGERI Sembilan in Malaysia is quite an interesting place. If nothing else, it's got a matriarchal society where land is passed from mother to daughter, rather than father to son.

It's unlikely that New Territories diehards will be keen to invest there, but the Negeri Sembilans have come anyway trying to get Hong Kong investment.

The chief minister, Mohamad Isa Bin Abdul Samad, was saying yesterday: ''I have been told that Negeri Sembilan has good fung shui.'' Apparently Sembilan means nine, which is particularly lucky in the Year of the Dog, and to prove it he's got the car registration plate number nine back home.

Tough call FOLLOWING on from the launch of the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, there's another index that would be fun to calculate.

We nominate the Hong Kong Resources Stock Index, comprising Chintex Oil and Gas, Mandarin Resources Corp and China Industrial International Corp.

It shouldn't be too difficult to calculate. They're all suspended, and have been for between one and eight years.

China Industrial gets in for its previous incarnation as Axiom Forest, which ran a logging operation in the Solomon Islands, which was hardly likely to win it a bouquet of pesticide-free roses from environmentalists.

It flogged them off just in time. Now owned by Kumpulan Emas, listed on the Kuala Lumpur Exchange, they're the subject of a blazing row with the Australians, whose Prime Minister Paul Keating was reported to say such companies were ''ripping off'' the Solomon Islands.

Going down GIVEN that Citibank Plaza is supposed to be ''Hong Kong's most intelligent building'', it's pretty clear why the computers at the futures exchange, which is based there, went blank yesterday.

The building had gone short on index futures and wanted to push the market down. Pretty intelligent, eh?