Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Following the reports of YG’s alleged habitual gambling in Las Vegas and Macau, it’s now being reported that police are investigating a connection between his gambling and the overseas concerts of YG Entertainment artists.
According to the report, police are tracing the source of Yang Hyun Suk’s gambling money and investigating whether he gambled using the proceeds from YG Entertainment artists’ overseas performances. After obtaining data from a casino association in Nevada, the police are currently analyzing the number of times Yang Hyun Suk gambled, how much he gambled, and whether he won or lost in order to determine the source of his money.
According to Channel A, a source from the police explained that they will also be investigating possible links between Yang Hyun Suk’s gambling money and YG Entertainment artists’ U.S. concert profits, as well as the agency’s company funds. Police will reportedly also look into Yang Hyun Suk’s younger brother and former YG Entertainment CEO Yang Min Suk.
So basically police are now looking into whether YG’s gambling sprees were funded by the activities of his artists overseas or even the company itself, which is likely why Yang Min Suk is also being looked at.
Declaring overseas profits has always been a bit shady for K-pop companies, and SM Entertainment was once investigated for overseas tax evasion and ordered to pay ~$10 million as a result. I’m sure that’s the point of interest for the government (and maybe even the FBI) in terms of making sure this wasn’t some kind of money laundering/embezzlement scheme where he declared it a gambling loss (or didn’t declare it at all) and thus didn’t pay taxes on profits (same for potentially gambling with company money). It also has to obviously be looked at as to whether his artists were being paid properly and what not or whether he was literally just gambling with their money.
