Other Developments
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
- In September, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered off the November ballot a constitutional amendment to license eight more commercial casinos in the state. The proposed amendment was flawed, the court held, because it would have automatically granted liquor licenses for the new casinos, circumventing state liquor control requirements. Citizens for More Michigan Jobs v. Secretary of State, No. 145754 (Sept. 5, 2012).
- In late October, police arrested the Nevada sports book director for Cantor Gaming, Michael Colbert, as part of a nationwide investigation of illegal sports betting. The company released a statement that Colbert had been dismissed from the company and that the charges brought in Queens, N.Y. were not connected to Colbert’s work for Cantor Gaming.
- Charbel Tannous, the leader of a team that rigged roulette games at the L’Auberge du Lac Casino in Lake Charles, Louisiana, was sentenced in early October to 37 months in prison by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
- A Kansas state judge ruled in September that Penn National Gaming is liable for breach-of-contract to Cherokee County, Kansas, for declining to build a state-owned casino. A jury trial will test the county’s demand for $53 million in damages.
- Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez of the Clark County District Court ruled in September that lawyers for Las Vegas Sands had intentionally concealed over 100,000 emails from their adversaries and the court in Jacobs v. Las Vegas Sands Corp., No. 10 A 627691 (September 14, 2012). As sanctions, the court limited the discovery objections the defendants could make for the rest of the case and ordered them to pay $25,000 to the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.
- An Austrian court ordered an online casino based in Malta to repay more than one million euros in gambling losses to an Austrian gambler after concluding that the Maltese firm had no license to offer games in Austria.
