Philippines' Congress bans Steve Wynn

Las Vegas gambling mogul Steve Wynn is no longer allowed to set up a casino business in the Philippines.

This developed after members of a congressional committee in the House of Representatives felt Wynn had denigrated the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) by alleging in his lawsuit in the United States that some Pagcor officials received bribes from Mr, Kazuo Okada, a Japanese business tycoon, and Wynn's estranged partner in Pagcor Entertainment City project in Manila Bay.

In a statement released to the media by his representative Masahiro Terada, Okada said  that Wynn was supposed to be his business partner in the proposed Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation  (Pagcor) Entertainment City in the Philippines. Unfortunately, Wynn quit the joint venture in 2010. A leading daily said that Wynn has chosen to support his Wynn Entertainment Casino in Macau. While Okada has set his eyes on investing in the Philippine gaming industry, through Tiger Resorts.

Pagcor chair Cristino Naguiat, however,  explained that he has not been a part of Wynn's lawsuit against Okada. And that he has never been astray from the President Aquino's drive of cleaning up the government of graft and corruption. The lawsuit alleged that Naguiat received a total of US$110,000 in hotel accommodations, gifts and cash from Okada.

The Wynn's ban was approved by the House Committee upon the motion of Samar Rep. Ben Evardone and Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez during that public hearing, where Naguiat also denied accusations that he received bribes from Okada.

It was learned that Okada plans to build a US$ 2 billion casino on Manila Bay. If the project will push through, it will compete with Wynn's casino operations in Macau. It was not immediately known if the Manila Bay project was the reason why Wynn quit the Manila Bay project.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Opening of public lands for agri-developments

Image
For many decades, vast tracts of forest lands are damaged across the Philippines. These are either the handiwork of nature like soil erosions, landslides, tremors or they're simply man-made due to humans' greed for immediate cash if only to survive. By all means, those who are within the proximity of the forests are free to do whatever they thought was best for them to survive or earn fast cash.  Notably, the most common practice that upland dwellers do is the cutting of firewood, slash-and-burn farming to plant crops even if these activities run counter to established forestry regulations that forbid them from doing these activities without permission from the authorities. Without a land of their own, they have to do it anyway. While some armed groups would simply engage themselves in illegal logging activities for profits. Forestry reports said that they even encroach on other's logging concessions to cut trees for sale to interested buyers. When I was working with the Mi
Read more

China is to blame for the pandemic spread

Image
Had the Chinese government taken the initiative or done enough to immediately contain the novel Coronavirus from spreading waywardly into other areas, this pandemic wouldn't have gone too far to pester other countries like Italy, the United States and the Philippines whose governments had declared a lockdowns thus causing extreme fears among the people, not to mention the derailments of some economies worldwide. But the provincial government, where Wuhan is an integral part of, acted too late to lockdown the place. The local government in Wuhan should have prevented residents from getting out, especially those who were infected by the virus. Sorry to say this, but the Wuhan government officials were lackadaisical in their approach to the health dilemma, thinking that the problem was just an ordinary matter which didn't require much attention. Until the problem got worse resulting to some deaths in the area had they known of Covid-19's serious impacts on the health of innoce
Read more