Las Vegas Sands Nixes EuroVegas
The chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, Sheldon Adelson, has ditched a plan that would have had the company developing a $30 billion casino complex in Spain.
Adelson backed out of the EuroVegas development plan last week, saying that the project was ultimately not good for the company’s shareholders.
Las Vegas Sands intends to focus its energy and resources on developing its Asian gaming sector, Adelson said.
Company could not find accord with Spanish government
At the heart of Las Vegas Sands’ departure from the plan was disagreements with the Spanish government spanning a few issues.
Notably, the Sands Corporation wanted the government to limit competition, lower gambling tax rates, and roll back anti-smoking laws that would have prevented patrons from smoking inside EuroVegas casinos.
“The government needs to preserve the general interests of all Spaniards,” the BBC News quoted Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria as saying.
EuroVegas would have created thousands of jobs
It is no secret that Spain is in the midst of a grueling economic crisis; the unemployment rate in the country currently stands at more than 25 percent.
The EuroVegas complex, which would have boasted twelve hotels, six casinos, a golf course, and a slew of retail, entertainment, conference and dining facilities, was predicted to generate up to a quarter million new jobs in Spain, where young people have been especially hard-hit by the country’s fiscal problems and unemployment woes.
EuroVegas was slated to be built in Alcorcón, a suburb of Madrid.
Adelson and Sands to shift focus
“While the government and many others have worked diligently on this effort, we do not see a path in which the criteria needed to move forward with this large-scale development can be reached,” 80-year-old Adelson said in a statement released on the heels of the company’s scrapping of the plan.
“Developing integrated resorts in Europe has been a vision of mine for years, but there is a time and place for everything and right now our focus is on encouraging Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, to dramatically enhance their tourism offering through the development of integrated resorts there,” the statement went on.
Las Vegas Sands, which operates the Nevada properties The Venetian and The Palazzo as well as the Sands Bethlehem in the state of Pennsylvania, also has interests in the Asian gaming mecca of Macau.
Sands’ interest in Asia comes at a time when Japan, in particular, has been on the radar of many major casino companies, as it looks into the regulation of casino gambling ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
Japan is said to be interested in clearing the way for casino gambling in part because it needs a vast number of new hotel rooms to accommodate visitors coming to the country for the Olympics.
