The former controlling shareholder of Australia’s Crown Resorts, James Packer, has vowed to never again invest in the casino industry – or to do business in China – after being forced to sell his AU$3.3 billion stake in the company in 2022.
In his first in-depth interview since a series of high-profile inquiries into Crown’s Australian casino operations – which among other areas explored the company’s association with Asian junkets and the 2016 arrests of Crown Resorts staff for the illegal promotion of gambling in mainland China – Packer told recently launched media outlet The Nightly that he was glad to have escaped the pressure of the casino industry and its “obligations to build things”.
“I accept Crown did things that it shouldn’t have done and I apologise for that,” Packer said.
“But the way the governments changed tax rates, changed deals, broke contracts … is a lesson to me in never wanting to be in regulated businesses again. I never want to go near a business like that again.”
Packer offered a similar sentiment in relation to China – once a key source of high-end customers for Crown’s resorts but a country he now describes as “uninvestible”.
“I’m not going to go back to China – no way,” he told The Nightly, describing the country as “not growing the way it was forecast to grow and not growing the way it used to grow.
“When you look around for people who are going to invest large sums of money into China – there isn’t a big, long list of people who want to do that anymore. And that’s very different to 15 years ago.”
Despite having moved on – Packer said he was mentally and physically “better than I’ve been for a while” – he also insisted he was proud to have built Crown Sydney, opened under a cloud in late 2021, “because we tried to build something that was truly world class.
“I’ve got a great apartment in Crown Sydney that makes me happy,” he said. “I hope I will start spending more time in Australia in the future.”
