Chile declares the Puerto Varas casino tender deserted
The streak of tenders that end up empty in the Chilean casino industry repeated itself once more, this time in Puerto Varas. The Gaming Casinos Superintendency resolved to declare the operating permit tender for that city deserted, after reviewing the two technical offers on the table and concluding that neither fully complied with what the process bases required.
The applicants were familiar: Inversiones y Turismo Puerto Varas, of the Dreams group, and Sociedad Quiquilhue, linked to Corporación Meier. The competition had started in January with the reception of those proposals, but ended without an awardee, and the regulator already anticipated it will open a new one and will again define the special conditions to include in the technical bases. The outcome is not a loose episode, but is framed within the criticism the Chilean tender model drags along after the process for the Iquique, Coquimbo, Viña del Mar and Pucón slots, of which only two attracted interested parties while Iquique and Viña were also left deserted.
Behind Puerto Varas lies a story that already spans years. The permit had been awarded to Enjoy in 2018, through the company Casino de Puerto Varas and with an offer of 151,501 development units, equivalent at the time to some 4,000 million pesos or four million dollars. The breaking point came in March 2022, when the Superintendency revoked that permit because the operator had not raised the committed integral project within the deadline set by law, of two years extendable by one more, which had expired on 1 August 2021.
The revocation was neither immediate nor silent. The procedure started the day after that expiry, when inspectors verified on site that the promised works were still unbuilt, Enjoy was notified on 6 August and the company presented its defence twenty days later. The mayor at the time, Tomás Gárate, described the situation as unprecedented for the country, while Enjoy blamed the municipality for the impossibility of advancing with the works and asked the authority to declare that impossibility. From the opposite side, the Municipal Works Directorate replied that the project did not fit the constructive rules of the regulatory plan and denied it the building permit, a clash that led to the background passing to the Resolutive Council on 2 February 2022.
While that chapter reopens, daily operation does not stop: the Puerto Varas casino keeps running under Dreams' administration in its municipal modality. With the tender back to square one, the permit's future is again in suspense, adding a new stretch to a file that accumulates more than seven years of administrative and judicial back-and-forth.
Tags: Superintendency of Gaming Casinos, Puerto Varas casino tender, Enjoy, Dreams, Casino Puerto Varas