By Eipéráng (Gregorie Michael Towai) – Independent Researcher, CNMI Advocate
AT a certain point, reporting on the Imperial Pacific International casino saga stops being about the casino.
What Shibani Mahtani has illuminated — carefully, cautiously, and without sensationalism — is a pattern larger than any single project: opacity repackaged as opportunity, reinvention without accountability, and economic desperation quietly leveraged against due diligence. That pattern is the real story.
And it does not end on land.
Corruption as background noise — again
Over time, corruption in the CNMI has ceased to be shocking; it has become ambient. This is where Mahtani’s reporting intersects with a broader body of analysis that many local conversations still avoid confronting.
Security strategist Cleo Paskal has long warned that the Commonwealth’s strategic geography — paired with weak governance, opaque finance, and inconsistent federal follow-through — creates an environment where outside actors see opportunity not despite dysfunction, but because of it. The influx of Chinese nationals over the past decade, she has argued, was not merely an immigration or labor issue; it was a signal to the world that the CNMI could be penetrated economically and administratively with relative ease.
Reputations form this way. Not by isolated scandals, but by repeated tolerance.
When scandal becomes infrastructure
The casino is simply the most visible node. Local investigative reporting by Kandit News Service has documented another layer of the same ecosystem: legislative subsistence allowances paid routinely, defended reflexively, and rarely subjected to consequences proportionate to public hardship.
On their own, allowances and transnational casino financing appear unrelated. Together, they normalize a single governing logic: extraction without proportional accountability. One operates at a global scale; the other at a local one. Both train institutions — and the public — to accept erosion as normal.
This is how corruption stops looking like criminality and starts looking like “how things work.”
From the casino floor to the ocean floor
Today, as public comments closed on federal inquiries into deep-sea mining, the relevance of this pattern became impossible to ignore.
Deep-sea mining is being framed, once again, as an economic solution — a potential revenue stream for jurisdictions described as “cash-strapped,” “isolated,” or “limited in options.” The language is familiar. So is the timing.
When financial distress becomes visible, it also becomes usable.
Whether through mining companies, intermediaries, or geopolitical actors, economic vulnerability has always been an entry point. The concern is not that someone might attempt to leverage the CNMI’s fiscal challenges to push seabed extraction forward; the concern is that history suggests such leverage works best in places already conditioned to accept opaque promises in exchange for short-term relief.
If the casino taught the world that the CNMI could be persuaded to suspend skepticism for the sake of survival, the seafloor may be the next frontier where that lesson is tested.
Predictability is the real risk
Jim Bob Kingman’s warning — that complacency eventually becomes complicity — cuts deeper when viewed through this lens. The most valuable asset for any exploitative system is predictability. When regulators, courts, and political leaders repeatedly choose continuity over disruption, they send a signal far beyond Saipan: this is a jurisdiction where urgency overrides scrutiny.
Sophisticated actors — whether in finance, extraction, or geopolitics — study patterns. They note how quickly resistance fades, how often “last chances” are invoked, and how frequently accountability is postponed for promised revival.
In that sense, the CNMI is not uniquely corrupt — but it is dangerously consistent.
The question beneath the seabed
The question before the Commonwealth is no longer whether a casino can be restarted, or whether deep-sea mining deserves “further study.” The deeper question is whether the CNMI is willing to interrupt a cycle that has become structurally comfortable for too many decision-makers.
Because once economic desperation becomes a governing strategy, every crisis becomes an invitation.
The ocean, like the casino floor before it, risks being framed as the next place where accountability can be deferred, harms externalized, and long-term consequences quietly discounted — so long as the immediate promise sounds convincing enough.
A narrow window still open
There is still space for the CNMI to change the narrative. But only if it recognizes that the story is no longer about isolated industries — casinos here, mining there. It is about whether the Commonwealth will continue to be legible to outside interests as a place where repetition goes unchallenged.
History is rarely kind to places that confuse survival with sovereignty.
And the most unsettling implication of Mahtani’s reporting, Paskal’s analysis, and our own lived governance record may be this: the next attempt — whether from land or sea — will not arrive as a surprise. It will arrive because the pattern invited it.
