Sheldon Adelson, the main shareholder of the Las Vegas Sands and CEOs of the company, again takes part against online games which he considers much more harmful than real casinos. It was in an article dated November 18 in the Washington Post, that we learned that Adelson the influential billionaire left for a crusade to have the United States of America banned.
Do online games endanger society?
Despite his leading position among casinotiers, Sheldon Adelson, who has several Casino Hotels complexes in Asia, is one of the most virulent opponents of Online casinos. Thus, in June 2013, he explained in an interview that the online game exhibited the most fragile people of a society with the dangers of the game: young people, elderly, workers. While the hard casino made it possible to identify the players and detect the most fragile, the online game from the anonymity that it allows the most fragile players to the madness of the game.
For him, the hardest part remains to come. If Nevada and Delaware have issued regulations towards online games, the opening of this market is imminent in New Jersey and States like California, Pennsylvania, New York and Florida are in full debate of the subject and should start to legislate on this subject. Sheldon Adelson He took a stand and wants the US Congress to just banish Online gambling of the American territory.
Sheldon Adelson, alone against everyone?
The American billionaire continues to raise the controversy in his sector. Thus John Pappas, director of Poker Players Alliance recently declared that the millions of Americans who wanted to play online and the states on which they would depend more in the balance than a billionaire like Adelson. Jan Jones Blackhurst, vice-president of Caesars relations entertainment with the government, criticizes the positions of Adelson, saying that a federal prohibition of online games would cause more problems than it would solve.
Lobbyists in action: According to the Washington Post, Adelson began to recruit lobbyists from Patton Boggs and Husch Blackwell, with a view to weighing in the 2014 legislative debates on the subject. Recall that Adelson has the means of his ambitions. In 2012, he had become the biggest donor in history by funding the Mitt Romney presidential campaign to $ 100 million against Barack Obama.
The polls in his favor?
If all seem to oppose the billionaire concerning online games, a survey conducted by the Tarrance Group, a republican survey institute, nevertheless goes in the direction of Adelson: “seven out of 10 voters have" negative feelings "about online games ”. Yet the billionaire seems isolated, including his own camp. Chris Christie, a favorite candidate of the Republican camp for the next presidential elections of 2016, is none other than the governor who authorized online games in New Jersey. Despite his bank account, will Adelson manage to switch the luck on his side?
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Adelson withdraws from the Madrid mega-casino project
And with all this, the big boss of the American group Las Vegas Sands, said, last Friday, December 13, that his group renounced the project, however expected for a long time, of construction of a mega-casino in Madrid. The Casinotier group said they preferred to concentrate the Korean and Japanese markets which need to expand their offer in terms of tourism through casinos and adjoining hotel complexes.
While the first stones were expected for the end of 2013 and the many back and forth of the group CEO between the USA and Spain, the project seems to be compromised.
Las Vegas Sands with his Méga Casino project in Spain had indeed triggered a controversy when he had asked to derogate from the law on smoking in the Iberian Peninsula. He had indeed asked that the use of cigarettes be authorized in his upcoming casinos.
The Minister of Spanish Health, Ana Mato, had then declared that her government was looking for a solution to this request, which made it possible to meet the requirements of the anti-Tabac law in public places and to benefit from the windfall of these 260,000 jobs direct and indirect. It must be said that in a country struck by unemployment these jobs and the amount invested by $ 30 billion was expected as the Messiah. But in this country struck by an unprecedented crisis from a real estate bubble, it must be said that the group's appetite and its real estate projects also worried a lot.
The authorities will therefore have to do without the American group which preferred to leave the too complex Europe for the Asian markets. It remains to be seen whether the project will survive the Adelson group, which recently decided to ban online games in the United States.
