There’s a Trump connection
U.S. Treasury officials are looking at casino operations on the island of Saipan, where a tiny gaming hall has become what Bloomberg News calls possibly “the most successful casino of all time.”
Best Sunshine Live is not even a permanent casino, but a temporary facility and training center that opened in 2015 to reap revenues for the operator while a luxurious $500 million permanent property was being built. Bloomberg reports that Best Sunshine has become more successful, “table for table,” than the biggest casinos in Macau. Its owner, Hong Kong-listed Imperial Pacific International Holdings Ltd., is currently constructing the eponymous Imperial Pacific integrated resort—called the Grand Mariana in some news reports—which is expected to open next year.
The Bloomberg headline included a name that always attracts interest, especially these days: President-Elect Donald J. Trump, whose protégé Mark Brown ran the Trump casinos in Atlantic City and is now Imperial Pacific’s chief executive officer.
Best Sunshine is posting numbers that “stagger industry veterans,” the news outlet reported. Daily reported revenue for each of its 16 VIP tables for the first six months of 2016 is about $170,000, almost eight times the average at the largest casinos in Macau, the world’s premier gaming destination. As a point of comparison, Best Sunshine’s handful of high-roller tables bring in more than half the money generated from 178 VIP tables at Wynn Macau. In September alone, Imperial Pacific reported $3.9 billion in bets at Best Sunshine, which means each of about 100 VIP gamblers wagered some $39 million in that 30-day period.
Several analysts who remained nameless said the numbers being racked up at Best Sunshine are almost unbelievable and therefore could be suspect. But Brown countered that Macau casinos may be under-reporting their own figures, making those on Saipan seem inflated by comparison.
To “enhance its integrity,” Imperial Pacific has added former CIA chief James Woolsey to its board, joining former military judge Eugene Sullivan. The company’s advisory committee for business strategies and government relations includes former FBI Director Louis Freeh and Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Imperial Pacific “wanted some Americans involved in case anything came up with the regulation or legalities,” Rendell says. He is paid $5,000 a month for his involvement, and said the astonishing Saipan revenues are occurring because Macau’s casino industry is “cratering.”
Imperial Pacific has a 40-year license on the island and has agreed to pay $15 million per year to fund the Marianas pension fund (Saipan is the largest island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, a U.S. territory). Another $20 million a year has been earmarked for a community fund, according to the island’s gaming regulator. The company also offered up a one-time $10 million payment to cover the electric bills of every island resident.
Brown is an Atlantic City native who got his start as a dealer in the Trump organization. He rose through the ranks to become a senior executive before leaving in 2005 to join Sands China. He remained there until 2009; in 2011, the Sands Corp. came under scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Macau during Brown’s term. In 2012, Australian regulators denied him a license to work at Sydney’s Star Casino but did not cite a reason. Las Vegas Sands this year settled the allegations for $9 million without admitting guilt. Brown was not accused of wrongdoing, and said he was never involved in the investigation.
Despite the constant flow of millions in gaming revenue, Saipan legislator Ramon Tebuteb said he fears the island is becoming a “safe haven” for laundered Chinese money. “It will happen, and I think it has happened,” said Tebuteb, who is minority leader in the Marianas House of Representatives. In 2015, the U.S. Treasury fined Tinian, another island in the chain, $75 million for “willful and egregious” violations of anti-money-laundering rules. That property soon closed.
But Edward DeLeon Guerrero, executive director of the Commonwealth Casino Commission insists, “We do not cahoot with the licensee. Have you seen corruption in other parts of the world? Probably. From my experience, I have not seen that.”
According to CalvinAyre.com, Imperial Pacific said the “allegations are false” and the property has established “stringent internal control measures” including “an anti-money laundering system to ensure compliance with all applicable United States laws and regulations.”
