Las Vegas Sands is investigating possible violations of anti-money laundering procedures at the company’s Marina Bay Sands casino in Singapore.
The probe is being headed by three independent directors with assistance from the U.S. law firm of Vinson & Elkins, according to a Bloomberg report.
The report says the investigation was launched in response to scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice and Singapore police sparked by a lawsuit filed by a former Marina Bay Sands high roller, Wang Xi, who claimed the property transferred SGD$9.1 million (US$6.8 million) from his casino account to other gamblers without his knowledge.
Wang won a settlement out of court last year with no admission of liability on the part of MBS.
However, an internal investigation conducted at MBS showed Wang’s case wasn’t an isolated one. Thousands of transfers worth an estimated SGD$1.64 billion had been shuffled among gamblers by employees from 2010 through 2017, apparently to facilitate gambling, according to the Bloomberg report.
Employees would get players to sign blank authorization forms then fill in transfer amounts and other details for subsequent wires. On multiple occasions they also used photocopies of the same documents to expedite the moves, copy signatures if needed and destroy the originals, people familiar with the investigations told Bloomberg.
MBS has since cut back on third-party transfers and has tightened its oversight of their use, according to documents cited by Bloomberg that show the number of transfers dropped to just six in 2018 from a peak of 1,011 in 2014.
