Company sought cover under Macau law
Nevada’s highest court has issued a temporary reprieve on behalf of Sands China Ltd., which was ordered last month to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties for withholding relevant documents in a wrongful termination case.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, on March 6 District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez ordered Sands China to pay $250,000 to the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada as a punishment for improperly withholding the documents. The wrongful termination suit was filed by Steven Jacobs, former president of Sands Macau.
Gonzalez’s order compels the Vegas-based company’s China subsidiary to turn over the documents and cover Jacobs’ court costs. The judge also barred the company from calling its own witnesses at an upcoming hearing. That prompted Sands lawyers to seek an emergency stay from the state Supreme Court. They said the sanctions “are unprecedented in Nevada law by barring a foreign corporation from presenting any witnesses or introducing any evidence in a jurisdictional hearing.”
The legal motion contends that these “draconian sanctions” make Sands China “a gagged participant in its own jurisdictional proceeding.”
In 2010, Jacobs sued Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Sands China in 2010 for breach of contract related to his termination. Gonzalez later ruled that neither the parent company or the Chinese unit could use the Macau Personal Data Protection Act to justify withholding or redacting documents pertaining to the termination.
