Macau Business Daily
The American billionaire also said Steve Jacobs “squealed like a pig to the government” and accused his former employee of making up stories.
Sheldon Adelson denied Las Vegas Sands officials played any role in firing Steve Jacobs from his position as Sands China CEO in July 2010. The Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands (LVS) was heard for the third time on Monday regarding the case of the company opposing Steve Jacobs. The latter says he was wrongfully fired in 2010.
“Never heard the phrase”, Mr. Adelson said after being questioned by Jacob’s lawyer, James Pisanelli, about any knowledge of an “exorcism strategy” to fire his client. “Las Vegas Sands had nothing do with his termination”, he added, according to Associated Press.
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Billionaire and casino owner Sheldon Adelson testified in court on Friday, as former CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. subsidiary Sands China had accused the gambling operator of being involved in illegal activities.
Steven Jacobs, former CEO of Sands China, claimed that he was wrongfully fired back in 2010, due to the fact that he objected to payments to a high-standing Macau official, as those might have been considered violation of the US anti-bribery laws.
Furthermore, the former executive suggested that Mr. Adelson’s company was related to the triads, one of the many branches of Chinese organized crime.
The owner of Las Vegas Sands said on Friday that Mr. Jacobs’ claims were groundless and accused him of tarnishing the reputation of the gambling company by placing wrongful accusations in media.
It seems, however, that Mr. Adelson was not willing to reveal more information about the activities of the casino operator, as he gave evasive answers to James Pisanelli, the lawyer who represented Mr. Jacobs in court. At some point, the casino mogul was even warned by Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez that he could not argue with her, after he did not acknowledge the ownership of a certain email, which was presumably signed by him.
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.
