• Home
• /
• Opinion

Monaco is getting its act together

Gaming revenues are down, and perhaps more ominously, the country has been pressured into joining global asset reporting conventions.

For many of us, it is a setting from a James Bond movie, a place where the impossibly elegant and rich gather to gamble, entertain themselves, and sigh over the state of the world. Monaco and its famed district of Monte Carlo are imaged to be a world apart.
But not all is luxury brunches and Lamborghinis. Many Monegasques, as residents of the principality are known, might live in the tax haven to protect their fortunes, but they are subject to the same foibles as other mere mortals, perhaps synergised by the heady mixture of opulence and complex wealth management issues.
And the outside world is just a stone's throw away. Surrounded by France on three sides, tiny two square kilometre Monaco certainly feels tremors in the world economy. Gaming revenues are down, and perhaps more ominously, the country has been pressured into joining global asset reporting conventions.
The Société des Bains de Mar (SMB), the publicly traded owner of the famed Monte Carlo Casino and other gambling and hotel properties, lost ?32.8 million from 2016 to 2017. Betclic Everest Group, another gaming company in Monte Carlo, registered a deficit of ?4.2 million in the period due to great competition in France, said a company statement.
Also, looming on the horizon are new asset reporting requirements by banks. From  February banks in Monaco will begin to provide client information in the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEI) programme managed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, part of a global effort to fight money laundering and tax evasion.
Another mainstay of the Monegasque economy, some of the world's most expensive real estate, appears to be on more solid ground. According to a report from local statistics agency Imsee, real estate transactions in the principality totalled ?1.79 billion in 2015, a decline from ?2.05 billion in 2014, but a huge improvement from the ?496 million in sales concluded in 2009 during the global economic crisis. By comparison, the transaction value of Dubai's real estate surpassed $72.7 billion in 2015, according to the Dubai Land Department.
But it is by no means all gloom-and-doom in the principality. Construction recently began on a $2 billion project to reclaim land from the sea so more luxury apartments can be built over the next 10 years to provide residences for the 2,700 multimillionaires forecast to settle there over the next decade.
In fact, construction noise is one of the main bedevilments for Monaco residents these days. It is annoying residents to the point that Prince Albert II of Monaco himself felt compelled to weigh in, asking the local press "to spread the word that the palace takes the problem of noise seriously". Royal plans are underway to address the problem, he said.
A vote is set for next month to elect members of a national council in the constitutional monarchy, and the local press reports the prince hopes candidates will "put their personal interests aside and not run for any egotistical objective". Bringing more quiet to the enclave is among the campaign issues.
Jon Van Housen and Mariella Radaelli are editors at the Luminosity Italia news agency in Milan