Sheldon Adelson, the gambling magnate and billionaire backer of Republican presidential candidates, made a combative appearance in a Las Vegas court on Tuesday in a case rooted in allegations his casino empire was involved in influence-peddling with a Chinese official and had ties to organized crime.
Adelson, who used his $25bn fortune to back Newt Gingrich and then Mitt Romney as Republican candidates for president, at times expressed outrage at what he said were “delusional and fabricated” allegations against him and his company.
The hearing was called to decide a jurisdictional issue – whether the case should be heard in Las Vegas where Adelson’s company is based or Macau where the allegations are focused. But the high stakes involved were demonstrated by the presence of a Las Vegas gaming commission official monitoring the case because it potentially has implications for the licensing of Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands casino empire.
Adelson is being sued for wrongful dismissal and defamation by the former CEO of his highly profitable operations of a Las Vegas Sands subsidiary in the Chinese enclave of Macau. Steven Jacobs says he was fired in 2010 because he objected to what he alleges were excessive payments to a Macau lawyer and legislator, Leonel Alves, on the grounds they may breach US bribery laws and because he opposed doing business with groups tied to Chinese organized crimes groups, the Triads.
Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire founder and chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., said the man he fired almost five years ago as the head of his casinos in Macau was a “very strange man” who almost detroyed the company.
Adelson, 81, testified Tuesday for the first time in open court about his conflict with Steven Jacobs, who was fired in 2010 as chief executive officer of Sands China Ltd. and who has accused his former boss of requiring him to do “outrageous” and “illegal” things, including collecting compromising information on Macau government officials.
“I didn’t trust anything that came out of Jacobs,” Adelson told a Las Vegas judge, adding that Jacobs’s wrongful-termination lawsuit has validated his distrust. “He tried to go behind my back and report to different members of the board so he wouldn’t have to report to me.”
Adelson, under questioning from James Pisanelli, one of Jacobs’s lawyers, said he should have fired Jacobs sooner because he “tried to kill the company” by unilaterally deciding to cut out the junket operators who control the supply of high-end gamblers that account for 60 to 70 percent of the gaming revenue in the former Portuguese colony.
No one has ever described Sheldon Adelson as a man happy with the world. Happy billionaires do not spend tens of millions of dollars trying to get Newt Gingrich elected president.
But it took a hearing in a Las Vegas courtroom to lay bare an unexpected target for the casino magnet’s ire along with Adelson’s more regular hostility to the “socialist” Obama, pot smokers and Palestinians.
The word’s eighth-richest man is no fan of other rich people. Or at least the “greedy” executive class raking in millions of dollars with what Adelson called “outrageous” bonuses and stock options that so disgusted supporters of the Occupy movement. High on that list are his own executives.
Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp., spent more than six hours on the witness stand Tuesday and repeatedly expressed his disdain for the former executive who brought him there.
Adelson said he never wanted to hire Steven Jacobs, the former president of Sands Macau who later filed a wrongful termination case against him. The witness said Jacobs had no experience running a company and nearly ruined Sands China Ltd. “many times.”
“He was one of the least competent and potentially destructive executives I had in over 50 companies in my 69-year business career,” Adelson said. “He only worked for the company for one year.”
Jacobs sued Sands China and Las Vegas Sands in 2010, shortly after he was fired. He later added Adelson as a defendant in the case.
Sheldon Adelson will be confronted in court for the first time with allegations of wrongdoing by a man he fired five years ago as the head of his Macau casinos.
Adelson, the 81-year-old billionaire founder and chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., is among the casino operator’s top executives listed as witnesses for a hearing starting Monday in a lawsuit brought by Steven Jacobs, the former chief executive officer of the company’s Macau unit.
Jacobs hasn’t had a chance during the 4 1/2-year-old Nevada case to put his ex-boss on the witness stand. He claims he was fired for balking at what he says were illegal demands, including to dig up information about high-ranking Macau government officials that, according to a court filing, could be used to “exert leverage.”
“There’s going to be mudslinging,” said Greg Doll, a lawyer at Doll Amir & Eley LLP in Los Angeles who isn’t involved in the case. “You can bet your bottom dollar that Jacobs is going to bring up stuff that is uncomfortable for Sands China and for Adelson in particular.”
Adelson denies allegations he ordered secret investigations into the business and financial affairs of government officials, as well as Jacobs’s claim that he personally approved a strategy condoning prostitution at the Macau casinos. Sands has said in court filings that Jacobs was dismissed for working on unauthorized deals and violating company policy.
