Kazuo Okada’s Universal Entertainment has lost a court fight with a former executive who sued the machine gaming giant for wrongly accusing him of assisting a US million transfer to the Philippines.
A Tokyo District Court judge ruled that Universal defamed Takafumi Nakano in a 2013 news release by tying him to the suspicious transfer and awarded him $27,000 in damages for mental suffering.
Okada was not found personally liable in the suit, but the defeat will do nothing to deflect the Japanese tycoon’s mounting legal troubles as he struggles to deflect investigations of his dealings in the Philippines by the FBI and gaming regulators in Nevada and elsewhere and resolve an internal investigation at Universal into alleged misappropriations of company funds.
The company said back in June that it had suspended its founder from executive responsibilities, accusing him of “a serious violation of governance”. Okada has since been removed as chairman and was denied a seat on a reconstituted board of directors.
Okada has blasted the investigation as “nonsense,” telling Reuters that one of the suspected transactions was a loan used to expand junket operations at the billionaire’s super-resort under construction in Manila. Universal controls that project via a subsidiary, Tiger Resort, Leisure and Entertainment. Okada was removed as chairman of Tiger in June.
The $10 million transfer was first reported by Reuters in 2010 at a time when Okada was pursuing approvals for the Manila resort and trying to get Steve Wynn, with whom he co-founded Wynn Resorts, to join him on the project. Wynn refused, setting up the potential for a board room battle at the same time that the $10 million was revealed to be part of an alleged $40 million scheme to buy influence with Philippine officials.
To date, no criminal charges have been leveled against Okada or Universal but the transfers drew the scrutiny of federal law enforcement in the U.S. and state gaming regulators by virtue of Okada’s ties to Wynn Resorts and Universal’s ownership of machine gaming developer and manufacturer Aruze, which is based in Japan but owns sizable subsidiary operations in the U.S.
Universal sued Reuters but Japan’s Supreme Court threw the case out, while Wynn Resorts launched its own investigation into the Philippine scandal that concluded in 2012 with Okada’s ouster as co-chairman and a member of the board and the forced redemption of his stock.
Okada is fighting those moves in Nevada court, so far without success, most recently losing a petition for company documents related to his ouster.
