The chairman and majority owner of the world’s largest bricks ‘n’ mortar casino group has launched a bitter and largely baseless attack on online gambling, urging US federal authorities to ban rather than regulate it.
Referring to the legalisation drive among US states unleashed since the US Department of Justice issued its landmark December 2011 ruling that the Wire Act only applied to sports betting, an op ed by Adelson in Forbes today described all forms of online gambling as a “toxin”, “a societal train wreck waiting to happen” and “fool’s gold” for gaming companies such as his.
The 79-year-old billionaire casino magnate said: “I strongly urge Congress to either rewrite the Federal Wire Act, or pass new legislation making internet gaming illegal nationwide”.
Departing from the consensus among the land-based lobby represented by the American Gaming Association, Adelson declared his opposition to online gambling on two fronts – its cannibalisation of the land-based industry and the “plague” it could bring to society via its lack of monitoring mechanisms equivalent to those found in land-based environments. The casino boss however failed to provide any solid evidence to support his arguments.
On the cannibalisation effect, he cited unnamed “recent research” in Europe that he said fortold the loss of 400,000 direct and indirect gaming jobs in the US. A 20% decrease in casino visits and a 26-28% rise in egaming revenue over ten years while land-based revenues remained flat was offered by Adelson as evidence that egaming had damaged the land-base.
Online gambling’s availability around the clock in homes and offices also made it impossible to determine if all wagers were being made in a “rational and consensual manner”, he argued, opening the way for people to gamble while under the influence of drugs and for children to find ways to gamble online. He said this couldn’t happen when someone had to make an effort to get dressed and head to a bricks ‘n’ mortar casino, where they would have to prove they were of gambling age and their gambling behaviour would be observed.
Children and young adults’ increasing addiction to computer games also left them “primed” for eventual exploitation by online gambling operators, said Adelson, again failing to provide any information, anecdotal or otherwise, to support his argument.
Adelson is the 52% owner of Las Vegas Sands and also holds 69% of the shares in Hong Kong-listed subsidiary Sands China, the two most valuable gaming companies in the world based on market capitalisation. He has spent many millions supporting his political views, including more than US$30m to the Republicans last year in an attempt to prevent the re-election of Presdent Obama. He also owns the largest-circulation paper in Israel.
His anti-igaming diatribe also follows two weeks after US Rep Peter King introduced his Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act of 2013, aimed at regulating all major products across the US, which would “grandfather” states with legislation on the books into the system.
Adelson also omitted any mention of the Alderney-licensed Venetian Interactive vehicle Las Vegas Sands established in 2003 to offer online gambling to players outside of the US.
Article written by Peter Holmes
Image by Bectrigger used under Creative Commons licence
