Judicial setback for Las Vegas Sands

Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands group has again failed in its attempts to remove feisty Clark County Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez as the presiding judicial officer in the company’s acrimonious but revealing wrongful termination litigation with former LVS China chief executive Steve Jacobs (see previous reports).

Gonzalez has shown in past court clashes with Adelson that she is not overawed by the billionaire land casino tycoon, and intends hearing the case through to completion despite previous arguments on jurisdiction and accusations that she is biased against the company.

The latest challenge to the judge’s suitability was thrown out Wednesday by the Nevada Supreme Court, which upheld a lower court’s February decision that Judge Gonzalez was both competent and suitable to hear the case.

Whether the LVS complaint against the judge is justified is probably now beyond further disruption of the termination case, where legal representatives of Jacobs have suggested that the opposition to the judge is a tactic deployed by LVS to prolong the proceedings – and the expense that this entails – in the hope that Jacobs will fold his cards.

The news caps a bad week for LVS so far; the company has had to shell out $2 million to settle a disciplinary clash with the Nevada Gaming Control Board for breaching state gambling laws.

Nevada regulators said the company violated state gambling laws by operating in an “unsuitable manner,” basing their decision on previously announced federal allegations that the company violated money-laundering and bribery-law accounting provisions in its Macau and Las Vegas casinos.

The latest penalty brings various recent settlement pay-outs by LVS to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice to a total of $58.5 million. The company was not required to acknowledge criminal wrongdoing in the settlement deals.

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