The Nevada Gaming Control Board has recommended that Elaine Wynn be declared suitable as a beneficial owner of Wynn Resorts.
The Nevada Gaming Commission is expected to approve the recommendation when it meets September 24.
Wynn, 78, owns 8.84 percent of Wynn’s stock after emerging two years ago as the company’s largest individual shareholder in the wake of the sexual misconduct scandal that brought an end to the reign of her ex-husband Steve Wynn as chairman and CEO.
As the company sought to recover from the regulatory fallout from the scandal her shareholding enabled her to push for a purge of her ex-husband’s close associates from the board of directors and to get Phil Satre, the highly respected former head of Harrah’s Entertainment, to serve as chairman.
The board added three women to replace those directors𑁋former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, businesswoman Betsy Atkins and Kestrel Advisors CEO Winifred Webb𑁋and join its lone female director at the time, Pat Mulroy, a politically well-connected businesswoman who once headed the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
The company also instituted a number of policies and procedures to combat workplace sexual harassment, including a compliance committee created to ensure such complaints are not ignored, as those involving Steve Wynn reportedly were.
However, in video testimony at the Control Board’s suitability hearing on September 10, Wynn said she does not exercise any direct role in Wynn Resorts management, and does not intend to, and will not seek to return as a director, a role she filled for more than a decade as a co-founder of the company before Steve Wynn engineered her ouster in 2015 in a legal battle over their respective shares.
“It’s a company I have great affection for, and I do like the name,” she told the board, saying she is satisfied serving as president of the Nevada State Board of Education and devoting her time to her numerous charitable efforts.
