A former judge who runs a royal commission in Victoria for the James Packer casino rresort, Crown Resorts, has warned that he will not tolerate delays in issuing papers in his investigation.
Ray Finkelstein said he intended to meet the deadline set by the Premier, Daniel Andrews, and present his report on August 1.
“Delays will not be tolerated,” Finkelstein said at a conference that officially opened the commission’s work on Wednesday morning.
The Investigation
He said apart from looking into the illegal spending and criminal links at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, an investigation by NSW found to be in place, his commission would look at other issues including whether the money was still in the casino and how the company handled the gambling problem.
Finkelstein said he had written to Crown asking if he would accept the findings of the NSW investigation, which was headed by former high court judge Patricia Bergin.
“Crown’s response is a little equivocal,” he said.
The company accepted that it was not appropriate to run a new casino in Barangaroo in Sydney but did not accept the the wilfulness or deliberateness of the conduct concerned,” Finkelstein said.
Substantial Reform Program
He said Crown said it was now suitable to run the Melbourne casino due to a “substantial reform program”.
“The results of this investigation may depend on the effectiveness of the program,” he said.
He said he wrote a second letter to Crown asking “in plain words” whether it had violated any of its obligations under the Victorian law or its agreement with the state government to operate the Melbourne casino.
The answer had not yet been received, he said.
The royal commission, with a budget of $ 10m, was named after Bergin found out that Crown was not eligible for a license to operate a new casino building in Barangaroo, Sydney harbor.
A similar royal commission is also under way in Western Australia.
Big Mistakes
In her report, tabled in NSW parliament in February, Bergin said Crown facilitated money laundering at its existing casinos in Melbourne and Perth and that junket operators who brought in high-rolling gamblers were linked to organised crime.
Bergin also criticized Crown’s handling of the arrest of 19 Chinese workers in 2016 for allegedly promoting illegal gambling.
He said Packer “made big mistakes” as a casino operator because he forgot or did not turn his mind to an undertaking Crown made to NSW authorities to exclude the late Hong Kong gambling magnate, Stanley Ho, from involvement in the Barangaroo facility, while selling some of his shares to Hong Kong company Melco Resorts, which is run by Ho’s son Lawrence.
Ho, who died in May last year, was banned from involvement in the Barangaroo casino due to his links with Triad organised crime groups.
