Inside Asian Gaming

October 2008 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING Feature I f sometimes the greatest gift is the unanswered prayer, then Harrah’s Entertainment and HIT Group both may have gotten a break with the termination of their joint venture to develop one of Europe’s largest casinos in the Slovenian city of Nova Gorica. The location for the resort, on the Italian border 95 miles from Venice, was within 150 miles of 8 million adults, within 300 miles of 26 million. It was to have 800 to 1,200 hotel rooms, a convention center, a showroom, a spa, retail shopping and restaurants, bars and nightclubs, in addition to 50,000 square feet of gaming space with 70 table games and 1,500 slot machines. The price tag was expected to exceed US$700 million. When finished it would have had 3,200 permanent employees. At full capacity it would have produced revenues of € 562 million a year, according to official projections—75 percent of that from gaming. Harrah’s and HIT were each to own one-half of the facility. As it turns out, the two companies opened their eyes in time to avoid potentially serious pitfalls which could have led to many years of grief and ill will. It was an unrealized dream. But at least it did not become a nightmare. When the plans for the project were announced back in 2005, Harrah’s CEO Gary Loveman proclaimed, “Nova Gorica is the right place, and this is precisely the right time, for this venture with our partners at HIT.” Up from ‘Vagabondism’ While Slovenia is one of the youngest and smallest nations on Earth, the Slovenes have existed for most of two millennia. So, too, the land of Slovenia has been familiar with gambling for many a century. Yet it has been only in recent years that a formal lottery organization has conducted games and formal regulation of casino gambling was instituted. The Slovenes live on a 7,827-square- mile piece of land located south of Austria and southwest of Hungary, east of Italy and north and west of Croatia. The country has a population of almost 2 million. The largest city, the capital of Ljubljana, has almost 300,000 inhabitants. In the Middle Ages the Slovenes were exposed to traders going to and from Italy and the Middle East.The traders carried playing cards and dice. The Catholic Church discouraged gambling;however,the practice was widespread among both laity and clergy. (A 15th century fresco in the Holy Sunday Church in the town of Crngrob shows two eager card players.) In the middle of the 18th century the authorities unsuccessfully tried to curtail gambling by prohibiting excessively high stakes and forbidding certain games. For most of the 20th century Slovenia was one of the constituent states of Yugoslavia, which came into being with the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War. It was known first as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and later as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Traditional casinos, which were fairly widespread in the Balkans at that time, were shut down in 1929 and professional gambling was classified as “unwillingness to work, vagabondism, harlotry” and “begging”. It was revived after World War II by the communist government of Marshal Josip Tito as a means to generate tourism for the beautiful beaches of the Adriatic and the mountain areas of the interior. A federal Law of Games of Chance came into force in 1962 Lucky in Loss Sometimes the best projects are the ones you don’t do. The US$700 million Slovenian courtship by Harrah’s and HIT failed, but it could have been much worse Harrah’s Entertainment, the world’s biggest casino conglomerate Slovenia has been familiar with gambling for many a century 37