Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2012 2 Editorial Inside Asian Gaming is published by Must Read Publications Ltd 8J Ed. Comercial Si Toi 619 Avenida da Praia Grande Macau Tel: (853) 2832 9980 For subscription enquiries, please email subs@asgam.com For advertising enquiries, please email ads@asgam.com or call: (853) 6680 9419 www.asgam.com Inside Asian Gaming is an official media partner of: http://www.gamingstandards.com Publisher Kareem Jalal Director João Costeira Varela Editor James Rutherford Operations Manager Ivan Nunes Contributors Desmond Lam, Steve Karoul I. Nelson Rose, Todd Haushalter Sudhir Kale, Jack Regan William R. Eadington, Richard Meyer Graphic Designer Brenda Chao Photography Ike, Alice Kok, James Leong, Wong Kei Cheong James Rutherford We crave your feedback. Please email your comments to James@asgam.com Mr Adelson’sWar In the early years of the last decade, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority ran a series of whimsical 30-second TV spots depicting your typical guy- or girl-next-door approaching the end of their Sin City holiday and surreptitiously basking in the afterglow of some satisfyingly risqué behavior completely out of character with their otherwise staid lives, far from the reproving eyes of the folks back home and which they’d never have to answer for because—and then came the now-famous slogan—“ What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas ”. Sheldon Adelson and the Republican Party might be wishing the same can be said for Macau. You know the story by now. Steve Jacobs, whom Mr Adelson fired a couple of years ago as president of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Sands China division, has filed a wrongful termination suit in the United States, alleging bribery and a host of other shenanigans by his former employers which if proved true constitute possible violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. LVS has acknowledged in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it is under investigation by the SEC and the U.S. Department of Justice in connection with those allegations and is cooperating with both agencies. Mr Jacobs begs to differ, and in a motion to have his case heard in Nevada, where it has a slight prayer, rather than in Macau, where LVS wants it and it has no prayer, he claims the company is withholding documents that would show that Mr Adelson personally approved a strategy of providing prostitutes to high rollers at his Macau casinos. Believe what you want about the veracity of Mr Jacobs’ accusations, the fact that he is an American and the guy who ran the store places them in a special category, one that will not quietly go away, say, like a Bo Xilai, and this could spell problems for Mr Adelson in his desire to be kingmaker in his own country. Mr Adelson has made the defeat of Barack Obama in November the measure of his power as one of the richest men in the United States. It’s a goal he can pursue openly since the U.S. Supreme Court, in a pair of controversial split decisions in 2010 ( Citizens United v FEC being the better- known of the two), equated money with constitutionally protected speech and enjoined the Federal Election Commission from enforcing existing regulations that restrict how much a person or corporation or other entity may spend to influence the outcome of elections for public office through donations to various advocacy groups. Freed of such limits, Mr Adelson and his family have spent more in campaign contributions in the last several months than their reported giving in all the years from Bill Clinton’s first run for president to the most recent congressional election—and that was a lot of money, US$27.6 million, according to news reports, including $17 million to create and bankroll a group called Freedom Watch, which advocated escalation of the war in Iraq, a military strike against Iran, then ran afoul of campaign finance laws and was disbanded in 2008 after Mr Obama won the White House and LVS got caught up in the global credit crash. Mr Adelson says he’s budgeting US$100 million to beat Obama and win back the Senate for the GOP. Newt Gingrich, a longtime ally in pro-Zionist and anti-labor union causes, got $20 million to chase the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The winner of that contest, financier and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, has been promised $10 million to date to an affiliated “SuperPAC,”the term for themultimillion-dollar“political action committees”created by the Citizens United decision. He’s pledged $10 million to campaign groups backed by right-wing industrialists Charles and David Koch and millions more, the totals aren’t publicly known, to groups run by Republican über-strategist Karl Rove, the guy they used to call “Bush’s Brain”. Another $10 million is being split between the re-election campaigns of John Boehner, speaker of the Republican- controlled House of Representatives, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Now the Web site of the Democratic National Committee is asking: “ What will Speaker Boehner, Leader Cantor, and House Republicans do with their Chinese prostitution money? ” Looking back at the success of that “ What Happens in Vegas ” campaign, one is reminded of what strange days those were—the Iraq invasion in full throttle, Wall Street flying high, the housing bubble expanding. It was pedal to the metal. Not to read too much into those ads, but we can see now what an artful expression they were of the prevailing illusion that we’d shaken loose of the chains of causality that bind behavior to its consequences. Interestingly enough, it was around the time those ads were airing all over the country that the Nevada Gaming Commission was giving its blessing to Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, and MGM Mirage (now MGM Resorts International) to open casinos in Macau. Did this come with concerns about how they were going to compete with Stanley Ho on his turf and on his terms? Was any thought given to the problems that were bound to pile up for an industry that was becoming increasingly globalized and therefore increasingly difficult to regulate effectively on the basis of the legal and cultural norms of any single jurisdiction? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and multinational giants like Wal-Mart want the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to go away, and if the Republicans win control of Washington they’ve promised to gut it. This will spell the end of most of Mr Adelson’s troubles with Mr Jacobs and the United States government.