Blackstone’s Crown allowed to keep Melbourne casino licence

NEW YORK: Crown Resorts retained the licence to operate its flagship Melbourne casino after the Victorian state gambling regulator said the company had rectified a litany of wrongdoing including underpaying taxes, facilitating money laundering and exploiting problem gamblers.

The decision is a reprieve for the Blackstone Inc-owned company, which faced the nuclear option of being stripped of its licence to run the casino.

The announcement yesterday brings to an end an almost eight-year saga dating back to late 2016, when a crackdown by authorities in mainland China led to the conviction of more than a dozen Crown employees for illegally promoting gambling.

Then, in 2021, an inquiry found Crown was unsuitable to run the Melbourne casino and placed it under the supervision of a government-appointed manager for two years to address its problems. He handed the regulator his confidential report card on the casino in January.

“The commission is satisfied that the systemic failings of Crown Melbourne are a thing of the past,” Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission chair Fran Thorn said at a press conference in Melbourne, where the watchdog is based.

Thorn said the regulator had been prepared to seize control of the casino and place it under government supervision if Crown was ultimately judged unsuitable to be the operator. She said the Crown must never become “too big to fail.”

Crown has faced a string of inquiries in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in recent years that uncovered a swathe of misdeeds. The probes found Crown, which was part-owned by billionaire James Packer at the time, was unsuitable to run casinos in each city.

Most damning of all, the investigation into the Melbourne site in late 2021 found Crown had underpaid taxes, facilitated money laundering and exploited problem gamblers. Former judge Ray Finkelstein, who led the inquiry, described the company’s behaviour as “illegal, dishonest, unethical and exploitative.”

Since then, Crown has paid A$250mil in fines imposed by the Victorian regulator under tighter legislation.

“The commission is satisfied that the systemic failings of Crown Melbourne are a thing of the past.” Fran Thorn