Las Vegas Sands Probably Violated Foreign Corrupt Act

[aurvandil]

Las Vegas Sands, the owner of our very own MBS, has conceded that it is guilty of bribery. This comes on the back on the back of allegations of triad involvement in the casino operations of Sands in Macau. Our CRA is supposed to ensure that only "suitable persons" operate casinos in Singapore. Will Las Vegas Sands still be a "suitable person" if it is guilty of bribery and involvement with triads? Stay tuned !

Las Vegas Sands Probably Violated Foreign Corrupt Act

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-03-03/las-vegas-sands-probably-broke-foreign-practices-law

Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS), embroiled in two U.S. probes and a court battle with the former head of its Chinese (1928) casino business, said for the first time it probably violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Macau unit Sands China Ltd. fell the most in two weeks in Hong Kong trading after billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Sands made the announcement in its annual report (LVS), citing an internal investigation. “There were likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions of the FCPA,” it said.

The findings signal repercussions for Sands from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice investigations of possible violations of the act, which prohibits improper business payments outside the U.S. Sands, which gets almost 60 percent of its revenue (LVS) from China, said it expects no material financial impact from the panel’s findings.

Ron Reese, a spokesman for Sands, declined to comment beyond the filing, made on March 1. The audit committee also found that the probable violations won’t lead to any financial restatements and don’t represent a weakness in current controls.

Sands China slipped as much as 2.7 percent, headed for the biggest drop in since Feb. 19, before trading 1.9 percent lower at HK$36.10 as of 11:09 a.m. in Hong Kong. That pared Sands China’s gain this year to 6.3 percent.

Jacobs Lawsuit

“If you look at Adelson and Sands, they’ve historically been in legal trouble for a number of things, and every time there is a short-time share-price loss it tends to bounce back up,” said Michael Ting, a Hong Kong-based gaming analyst with CIMB Securities Ltd. “We don’t think there would be any long- term negative issues on the share price.”

Sands previously held that its dealings in Macau, a former Portuguese colony and the only Chinese city where casinos are legal, were above-board. In an August interview, the chief executive officer of its Asian unit, Sands China Ltd., said Sands doesn’t engage in “crimes or illegal activities.”

The company has said that a lawsuit filed by former Sands China CEO Steven Jacobs probably triggered the government probes.

Singapore and Macau’s casino regulators did not immediately respond to phone calls and emails from Bloomberg News seeking comment on the impact on Sands operations in their cities.

Jacobs sued Las Vegas Sands in 2010, alleging he was fired because he wouldn’t give in to the “illegal demands” of Adelson, who is chairman and CEO. Jacobs said Adelson directed him to secretly investigate Macau government officials and use “improper leverage” against them.

Adelson, 79, has an estimated net worth of $24.9 billion, making him the world’s 18th-wealthiest person, based on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Sands’ Defense

Following Jacobs’s allegations, the Justice Department and SEC opened FCPA-related investigations. The law prohibits companies with U.S. operations and their intermediaries from making improper payments to foreign officials to win or retain business.

Las Vegas Sands has denied Jacobs’s allegations and has said it’s cooperating with the investigations. Lawyers for the company have said in court filings that Jacobs was dismissed for working on unauthorized deals and violating company policy.

A Nevada judge in September sanctioned Sands for not disclosing that evidence it said couldn’t be taken out of Macau was already in the U.S.

The company didn’t elaborate on the likely FCPA violations. It said it has improved its practices with respect to books and records and internal controls.

The audit committee probe, while ongoing, is largely completed, Sands said. It said it’s cooperating with the investigations, and that it “is currently unable to determine the probability of the outcome of this matter, the extent of materiality, or the range of reasonably possible loss, if any.”

Adelson Background

Casino revenue in Macau, the world’s largest gambling hub, rose 14 percent to $38 billion last year.

Las Vegas Sands has advanced 11 percent this year. The stock closed at $51.31, down by 0.35 percent, on March 1 in New York before the announcement.

The company in November approved a special dividend to shareholders ahead of an increase in federal taxes this year. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who regulatory filings show own about 51 percent of the stock, stood to collect about $1.2 billion. The couple contributed at least $87 million in last year’s failed effort to elect Republican Mitt Romney as U.S. president, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

 

[aurvandil]

The following is a link to a Reuters article of how Las Vegas Sands is involved with the triads in Macau. This article came out BEFORE the casino license was issued to MBS. The bribery admitted to by Sands is related to monies paid to regulators in Macau to "look the other way" with regard to these triad links.

Special report: High-rollers, triads and a Las Vegas giant

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/29/us-casinos-macau-sands-idUSTRE62S34020100329

By Matt Isaacs and Reuters staff
SAN FRANCISCO/MACAU (Reuters) - Late last autumn, a Hong Kong jury convicted four men of a conspiracy to commit bodily harm and a fifth of soliciting a murder.

At first, the men had been ordered to break the arms and legs of a dealer at Sands Macau suspected of helping a patron cheat millions of dollars from the business. Later, a call went out to murder the dealer, court records show. But then one of the gangsters balked and reported the plans to authorities.

The plot's mastermind, according to testimony in previously undisclosed court transcripts obtained by Reuters, was Cheung Chi-tai. At trial a witness identified Cheung as a leader of the Wo Hop To -- one of the organized crime groups in the region known as triads. Another witness, a senior inspector with the Hong Kong police called to testify because he is an expert on the triads, identified Cheung by name as someone who would commit crimes for money. Cheung's organized crime affiliation was corroborated in interviews for this article with law enforcement and security officials intimately familiar with the gaming industry in Macau.

The murder-for-hire case sheds light on the links between China's secretive triad societies and Macau's booming gambling industry. It also raises potentially troubling questions about one of the world's largest gaming companies, Las Vegas Sands, which plans to open a $5.5 billion Singapore casino resort in late April.

Cheung was not just named as a triad member but also, according to a regular casino patron testifying in the trial, "the person in charge" of one of the VIP rooms at the Sands Macau, the first of three casinos run here by Las Vegas Sands. In addition, Cheung has been a major investor in the Neptune Group, a publicly traded company involved in casino junkets -- the middlemen who bring wealthy clients to Macau's gambling halls. Documents show that his investment allowed him a share in the profits from a VIP gambling room at the casino.

An examination of Hong Kong court records, U.S. depositions from the former president of Sands, and interviews with law enforcement and security officials in both the U.S. and Macau, reveals a connection between Las Vegas Sands and Cheung -- ties that could potentially put Sands in violation of Nevada gaming laws.

The Reuters investigation is a collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at University of California, Berkeley.

U.S. casinos operating in Macau are all headquartered in Nevada and must comply with that state's laws which prohibit "unsuitable" associations that "discredit" its gaming industry. Those laws are meant to keep organized crime figures out of the casinos.

Leading up to its public offering in Hong Kong last November, Sands China, a subsidiary of Las Vegas Sands, acknowledged the risks of working with gaming promoters -- another term for junkets: "If we are unable to ensure high standards of probity and integrity of our Gaming Promoters with whom we are associated, our reputation may suffer or we may be subject to sanctions, including the loss of (Sands' Macau gaming license,)" the company wrote in a public filing.
Randall Sayre, a member of the Nevada Gaming Control Board that monitors casino compliance, declined to comment specifically on Sands Macau, writing in an email that the state "takes no public position on suitability ... without a full investigative work-up."

A gaming official, who insisted upon anonymity, said: "This relationship (with Cheung) would be of concern to Nevada authorities. You're talking about direct ties to bad guys." Another said the agency is monitoring the situation.

Las Vegas Sands issued a statement saying, "to our knowledge, Mr. Cheung Chi Tai is not listed as a director or shareholder" with any of the gaming promoters the company uses in Macau, but declined to comment further.

Sands was the first U.S. operator to cash in on the Chinese passion for gambling when it entered Macau in 2004 after the government opened the casino market to outsiders.

Since reverting to China in 1999, Macau, an hour away from Hong Kong by ferry, has flourished as one of the world's wealthiest cities. The territory's economy has soared in recent years -- much of the wealth generated by the enclave's casinos.

Indeed, the former Portuguese colony has become a playground for China's nouveau riche. And the gleaming neon red lights of the Sands Macau casino are the first sights a visitor takes in as the ferry approaches Macau.

THE JUNKETS

The link between Macau's gambling industry and organized crime may be an open secret, but it has come under increasing scrutiny lately. Within the last two weeks, MGM Mirage said it would give up its holdings in New Jersey in response to pressure from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. The state agency had said that Pansy Ho, MGM Mirage's partner in Macau and the daughter of casino tycoon Stanley Ho, was an "unsuitable" associate, an assertion stemming from the agency's belief that her father has links to organized crime.

The involvement of the triads in Macau's casinos is centered on the murky and highly profitable junket business. The VIP sector brought in $9.9 billion last year, two-thirds of the enclave's total gambling revenues.
Macau has about 187 licensed junket operators, said Manuel Joaquim das Neves, director of Macau's Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau.

The junkets are crucial because they ensure the flow of capital by extending credit to gamblers, often millions of dollars on a visit. They assume responsibility for collecting on their loans -- at times indelicately, authorities say.

They also often assume management of the private VIP rooms. And while many law-abiding junkets are active in Macau, experts say the industry is highly susceptible to criminal influence given the extra-legal functions and opaque environments in which they work.

In an interview, Dan Grove, a former agent for the FBI who oversaw security for Sands Macau in the first few years after its opening -- and before the casino became involved in junkets -- characterized pressure from triads to work with the casino as "immense."

When known crime figures applied directly for contracts, blocking them was easy, Grove says. But if legitimate professionals submit applications and then sub-contract the work to the triads, detecting such ties was more difficult if not impossible.

JUMBO BOOM

Cheung Chi-tai's ties to Sands Macau came through such a multi-tiered arrangement. His solely owned company, Jumbo Boom Holdings, provided capital for another firm, now called Neptune Group, to acquire a stake in Hou Wan, a junket operator. Hou Wan was entitled to profits from Sands Macau's Chengdu VIP room.

Cheung owned more than 8 percent of Neptune Group in 2008, according to public filings with the Hong Kong stock exchange. That made him a substantial shareholder when the call for the dealer's murder went out.

When asked about Cheung, Nicholas Niglio, Neptune's chief operating officer, said: "I'm not familiar with him at all."
After a reporter showed him Neptune's 2008 annual report listing the firm's substantial shareholders, including Cheung, Niglio declined to respond specifically. Cheung does not appear in Neptune's 2009 annual report.

Niglio said Neptune wasn't a junket itself but invests in VIP junkets that operate at the Sands Macau, the Venetian Macau and Galaxy Entertainment's StarWorld casinos. He said Neptune now had a 20 percent stake in Hou Wan, a junket operator that runs around 20 VIP tables at the Sands Macau.

In Neptune's public filings three years ago, Cheung was described as a "merchant in Hong Kong" whose company "generally does not engage in underwriting business and has no underwriting experience as at the date of this announcement."

While Niglio described Neptune merely as an "investor" in junkets, trial testimony placed Cheung inside the casino's private room.

According to testimony by Siu Yun-ping, aka the "God of Gambling", who won about HK$100 million ($12.9 million) between August 2007 and January 2008 at various casinos, Cheung was "the person in charge" of the Chengdu Hall, one of the VIP rooms that Siu frequented.

Las Vegas Sands, however, has said it maintains management of all its VIP rooms, though it acknowledges working with gaming promoters to attract customers.

 

[Bigfuck]

LHL cannot heal the PAP. He is as best a 386 CPU and cannot handle higher levels of processing. His grey and white hair is a sign of overclocking. He does not have the capacity to use higher level components though it is a fact his components are overpriced, overhyped and not reliable.

 

[prancku]

His grey and white hair is a sign of overclocking.

Over clocking? Correct me if I am wrong - We were given to understand by the media that he starts his day in the office only at 10.30 am and call it a day at 4.30 pm, reason being that he has to keep a balance between work and health due to his previous bout with cancer.

Of course, the spin is also that there are state, party and other official functions to attend in the evening as well as that being computer savvy, he keeps in touch with others, online late into the night.

The white hair? Ask the biologist lor, for if you notice, the progenies of the old man all exhibit the similar trends of aging before their times.