Inside Asian Gaming

October 2016 inside asian gaming 29 In Focus a former director of financial planning at GGAM, says. The project is co-owned by the families of Mr Weidner and Andrew Fonfa, a local property developer. Dozens of Asian investors were projected to provide US$80 million of the roughly US$150 million budget. Documents from Lucky Dragon’s parent company, privately held Las Vegas Economic Impact Regional Center, filed with an application for a US$25 million project subsidy from the Las Vegas government, suggested that the two families shared a US$45 million stake in the project. When city officials rejected the subsidy, the two families plugged the gap, raising their stake to about US$70 million. Whether that’s a good deal depends on whether Mr Weidner can shake the bad luck that’s followed him since leaving LVS. Under a five year management contract, GGAM operated Solaire Resort and Casino, the first property in Manila’s Entertainment City, from its March 2013 opening. Billionaire owner Enrique Razon fired the firm that September, deriding GGMA as “a very expensive, glorified executive search firm” and claiming its all-star team didn’t pay sufficient attention to the resort’s slow start. GGAM contends it exceeded its contractual obligations and laid the groundwork for Solaire’s ascent to market leadership under current President and COO Thomas Arasi, another LVS alumnus recruited to open Marina Bay Sands by Mr Weidner’s successor Michael Leven. An international tribunal in Singapore has now ruled that Razon’s Bloomberry Resorts was not justified in terminating GGAM’s contract. In May 2014, GGAM announced it would manage gaming at Baha Mar, the US$3.5 billion integrated resort in the Bahamas. The island nation’s largest ever tourism project, financed by mainland China’s state-owned Ex-Im Bank and built by state-controlled China State Construction Engineering Corporation, Baha Mar missed promised opening dates in December 2014 and March last year. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid allegations of shoddy construction and collusion between the lender and builder. The project remains in limbo. Mr Weidner has also been involved in efforts to develop an integrated resort on Matsu, the first, and so far only, of Taiwan’s outlying islands to approve casinos. That project remains a hostage to lawmakers in Taipei who have yet to pass the enabling legislation for casinos and of mainland China authorities who say they’ll bar citizens from taking the short ferry ride across the strait to gamble in what Beijing considers a renegade province. Mr Weidner also attracted wide attention with a highly publicized meeting with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phu in May, ahead of the announcement of a US$4 billion mixed use development in Ho Chi Minh City that generated speculation it would be Vietnam’s first casino in its largest city. That meme had unraveled by August. “Instead of targeting Chinese players from Asia, Lucky Dragon is focusing on Asian players in North America, starting with the estimated 200,000 Asians living in the greater Las Vegas area.”