Las Vegas Sands Corp. chairman and CEO, Sheldon Adelson, is planning to inject 21 billion Pounds (35 billion Dollars) into a mini Las Vegas style strip in Spain. His casino complex will either be built in Barcelona or Madrid – the country’s two largest urban areas – and will consist of 36,000 hotel beds, 18,000 slot machines and 3 golf courses.
Adelson has just opened a new casino property in the former Portuguese colony Macau. The US billionaire, complete with his fiery red hair and outspoken attitude, attended a grandiose opening ceremony on Wednesday that featured lion dancing, high rise tightrope walkers, a traditional Chinese dragon dance, and the unveiling of a 5,500 pound bronze and gold ‘God of Fortune’ statue.
The God of Fortune is designed to entice gamblers and investors to take a chance and win big, something that Adelson knows all about himself. When he planned to build a colossal Venetian style casino complex in Macau, the only region of China where gambling is legal, the area was full of seedy gambling dens and the site of the property was a grimy marshy swamp. But since the construction of the world’s 6th largest building by area, Macau has become an extremely popular and profitable gambling resort; last year Macau’s gambling revenue was 20 billion Pounds (33.5 billion dollars), more than 5 times that of Las Vegas.
Adelson has described the Spanish project as a 5-10 year venture and although he acknowledges that Europe does not share Asia’s “ultra-high appetite to gamble”, he does expect demand to pick up significantly over the 10 year target range. The construction of the casino complex will offer a considerable boost to the ailing Spanish economy, and the masses of people employed to run the resort will help Spain reduce its extremely unhealthy 23.3% unemployment rate. Adelson is looking for the Spanish government to issue him a low-rate gambling tax, but if the Spanish strip proves anywhere near as lucrative as his investment in Macau then casino profits will substantially support Spain’s finances even at a low rate.
Spain has recently pushed through an austerity budget for 2012 that involves 27 billion Euros of spending cuts and tax increases in an attempt to bring down their public deficit from 8.5% of GDP to a revised Eurozone target of 5.3% this year. The official fiscal compact of the Eurozone states that all countries must have deficits of no more than 3.0%.
Adelson’s Casino complex is not the first effort towards rejuvenating growth in Spain, through somewhat unconventional means… The Spanish village of Rasquera is attempting to transform its rural land into a large scale marijuana plantation in an urgent bid to create jobs and raise money to pay off debts. The cannabis growing proposal expects to increase land revenue tenfold, but the scheme remains subject to approval, and instigators will have to navigate around a complex set of governing laws before plans can be put into place.
The Marijuana plantation idea appears to be a little farfetched considering the negative social implications that accompany the ‘crop’. “It will lead our grandchildren into perdition” – the cautionary chorus of Rasquera’s older generation. However the Las Vegas style mini-strip is a very real proposition. The negative effects of gambling are well-documented: bankruptcy; depression; divorce; debt; homelessness; redundancy; total lack of self-worth, to name just a few. But somehow – perhaps through the ostentatious mirages of prestige and authenticity that decorate the gambling arena – casino complexes have earned themselves enough legal stature around the world to make them impervious to the issues of ethics and morals that so plague other objectionable enterprises.
… Or perhaps casinos are permissible because they generate large, large, large, LARGE sums of money for the areas in which they inhabit, and they do it with class, 5,500 pounds of bronze and gold statue’s worth of class.
Comments are closed.