A co-founder of the SLS Las Vegas is suing the Strip casino’s new ownership for months of unpaid licensing fees. But those fees are now a thing of the passed since the current owner, Las Vegas Resort Holdings, owned by media tycoon and billionaire Alex Meruelo, has decided to revert to the property’s original name, Sahara Las Vegas.
California-based SBE Hotel Licensing, a unit of Sam Nazarian’s SBE conglomerate, which owns the SLS hotel brand, claims in an action filed in Nevada that new owner Las Vegas Resort Holdings has failed to pay at least $450,000 in fees dating back to November that allow the North Strip resort to use the SLS name and operate SBE-branded restaurants, including one fronted by celebrity chef José Andrés.
Meruelo purchased the struggling 1,600-room SLS in 2017 and has pledged to invest $100 million to turn it around.
A spokesman for Meruelo, whose holdings include several English- and Spanish-language TV and radio stations in California and a Reno casino hotel, the Grand Sierra Resort, said earlier this year that a name change could be in the cards for the SLS.
“We will be using the SLS name for another year and will evaluate our options with the brand moving forward,” he said.
That option was realized last week as a dramatic reveal of the new Sahara Las Vegas name. General Manager Paul Hobson said that the historic ties to the city, including a major road being named after it, helped them settle on the name.
“We landed on Sahara as being a very appealing option,” he told the Las Vegas Sun. “A lot of people speculated that it was going to be Grand Sahara Resort because that would match Mr. Meruelo’s Grand Sierra Resort property in Reno. We just thought that Sahara, without any modifiers, was powerful.”
Originally a joint venture between Nazarian’s Los Angeles-based SBE, which controls a global portfolio of hotel, restaurant and nightlife brands, and San Francisco-based Stockbridge Capital Partners, the SLS opened to acclaim three years ago at the site of the old Sahara Hotel Casino, which had closed in 2011. The partners spent $400 million to buy the property and another $415 million to turn it into a draw for younger gamblers and party-goers. It didn’t catch on, however, in part due to its remote location far from the main Strip action, and has steadily lost money. Nazarian eventually exited, selling his minority stake to Stockbridge, which sold out to Meruelo for an undisclosed sum.
