Las Vegas Sands Corp. is stalling a wrongful termination lawsuit by its former Macau casino chief that could expose billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s company to “serious legal and political problems,” the fired executive said in court papers.
Steven Jacobs, who sued Sands in 2010 after he was fired as chief executive officer of the casino operator’s Sands China Ltd. unit, said in a filing this week in the Nevada Supreme Court that he has three investigative reports commissioned by the company “on foreign government officials, as well as individuals with whom they were doing business that were suspected of having ties to Chinese organized crime.”
Sands was sanctioned last year by the Las Vegas trial judge presiding over the lawsuit for not disclosing that it was sitting on a trove of documents in Nevada that Jacobs sought as evidence and which the company had claimed couldn’t legally be removed from Macau. The company, which is now appealing three other rulings by the judge to Nevada’s highest court, last month won a postponement of a hearing on whether the claims against Sands China belong in Nevada.
“LVSC and Sands China believe they are above the law; too big, too important, and too influential to play by the rules,” Jacobs said in the filing. “It is with this attitude that they ground this action to a standstill. It is a defendant’s dream.”
Sands China fell 2.1 percent to HK$41.90 at 1:47 p.m. in trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
‘Shrill Claims’
The company said Jacobs’s allegations that it’s trying to stall the lawsuit are “baseless” and accused him and his attorneys of making “increasingly shrill claims” about concealment of documents and sabotage of evidence-sharing in the case, according to a July 23 filing with the Nevada Supreme Court.
As for Jacobs’s specific claim that Sands is trying to delay the Nevada jurisdiction hearing, “the facts don’t support that premise,” Ron Reese, a company spokesman, said yesterday in a phone interview.
Jacobs alleged he was fired after he had conflicts with Adelson, who is Sands’s majority owner and chairman, including fights over what he said were illegal demands that secret investigations be performed of Macau government officials for information that could be used as leverage to thwart adverse regulation.
Following Jacobs’s allegations, the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission opened investigations into whether Adelson’s company violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That law prohibits companies with U.S. operations and their intermediaries from making improper payments to foreign officials to win or retain business.