Out of court settlements are routinely kept confidential. But if Las Vegas Sands Corp. paid cash to make the latest dispute over its Macau gaming licence go away then the details are likely to surface sooner or later.
Clive Bassett Jones, Dax Turok and Cliff Cheong claimed they were owed five percent of the value of LVS’s Macau permit—which their lawyer said in pre-trial hearings was worth at least USD500 million.
It seems unlikely that an out of court deal will have realised anything remotely like that figure. But if the settlement involves a seven-figure sum or greater it will be hard to bury it completely in the LVS balance sheet, even if the payment is amortised.
The three men claimed they saved LVS’s 2002 bid for a Macau gaming licence by introducing the company to Hong Kong-based Galaxy Entertainment Group (GEG). They said this was at a time when LVS’s scheme to join forces with a Taiwan company had stalled on political grounds. LVS and GEG eventually parted company before getting round to building anything together. But by then LVS had its foothold in the market because the Macau government allowed the two to sub-divide the licence.
If the matter had gone to trial, the Nevada court would have heard evidence from Sheldon Adelson, the LVS Chairman and Chief Executive, and from William Weidner, a former president and chief operating officer of the company.
Under accounting disclosure rules, the LVS’s shareholders will probably get wind of the financial implications of the out of court deal somewhere down the line—even if it’s filed under ‘extraordinary’ or ‘nonrecurring items’ on the company balance sheet.
If investment analysts don’t pick it up in the next round of LVS results, then the US Securities and Exchange Commission reporting rules may deem it ‘a material event’, in which case details may emerge via that route.
The normally busy LVS media team didn’t even put out a press release about the striking of the deal achieved a few days after the scheduled civil trial of the case.
In May 2008, a jury at the same Clark County court complex awarded Hong Kong businessman Richard Suen almost USD60 million for his help in introducing Las Vegas Sands executives to Chinese government officials. That verdict is on appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.
