The second of Australia’s two major casino operators has now been found to have sacrificed basic moral principles and perhaps flouted the law in the pursuit of money.

According to an independent inquiry by Adam Bell, SC, released on Tuesday, Star Entertainment, like Crown Resorts before it, allowed itself to become a haven for money laundering and organised crime.

Star’s behaviour, described in the report for the NSW Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, is arguably worse than the failures exposed by Patricia Bergin’s inquiry into Crown last year in Victoria.

As ILGA chairman Philip Crawford said, Star has shown “institutional arrogance” and has “thrown the moral compass out the window”.

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He launched a scathing attack on Star for failing to remove firm’s chief executive and other key managers, while also describing some serving board members – whom he didn’t specify – as not up to their job.

Bell’s review makes clear that Star was not simply negligent or lax in fulfilling its obligations to check the source of funds wagered on its tables. Rather, Star actively helped shady tour companies known as “junket operators” set up “pea and thimble” schemes, which made it almost impossible to do so.

For example, in 2013 Star started accepting payments eventually worth $908 million from debit cards issued by China Union Pay bank, which it billed as payments for hotel expenses. In fact, Star transferred the money to the accounts of Chinese gamblers at its tables but it used a series of ruses which concealed the true source of the funds from regulators and NAB, the bank which processed the payments. Bell described this as an “inherently deceptive and unethical process”.

Star also allowed a Macau and Hong Kong-based junket operator called Suncity from 2017 to run a separate gaming room on its premises called Salon 95, where gamblers were able to flout restrictions on buying chips and receiving payouts in cash. It continued this practice until December last year despite clear warnings about Suncity’s owner Alvin Chau’s character and Suncity’s links to organised crime. Bell said it should have been clear to Star from the middle of June 2018 that the link with Suncity was problematic.