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The Packer directors are gone. Guy Jalland and Michael Johnston have left the Crown Resorts board in the wake of dramatic findings of the Bergin Report. Chair Helen Coonan and others will remain under pressure. After all, they are responsible, they are the directors, and Justice Bergin found Crown was not suitable to run a casino. So, what’s next, asks Charles Livingstone?
After months of hearings, characterised by spectacular admissions including threats of violence, the report of the Bergin Inquiry into the probity of Crown Sydney Gaming, a subsidiary of Crown Resorts Limited, has been tabled in the NSW parliament.
Crown Resorts runs the Crown casinos in Melbourne and Perth.
The Inquiry found that Crown Sydney Gaming was “not a suitable person” to operate the Sydney casino.
It also found the parent, Crown Resorts Limited, was “not suitable to be a close associate of the licensee”.
The serious corporate failures relate to
- Crown’s operations in China and the arrests of the employees in October 2016 with “numerous failures to escalate indicators of real risks to the staff”
- the infiltration and exploitation of Crown’s Melbourne and Perth operations by “criminal elements, probably including international criminal organisations”
- the probability of money laundering in the accounts of two Crown subsidiaries “and in the casino premises with hundreds of thousands of dollars brought into the casino in cooler bags and shopping bags and exchanged for chips and plaques”
- Crown’s failures to ensure it only had commercial associations with Junket operators of good repute
Other matters relate to “the structures in place that have contributed to the corporate failures” including:
- the existence and operation of a Controlling Shareholder Protocol
- Crown’s relationship with James Packer and his company Consolidated Press Holdings
- Crown’s risk management structures and their resourcing.
The report says it is clear each director understood as at 2019 that Crown had given an undertaking to the NSW Government and the Authority that it would not allow the late organised crime figure Stanley Ho to acquire a direct, indirect or beneficial interest in Crown.
Undertakings not honoured
Yet it found the late Mr Ho’s associated entity had an interest in Melco Resorts & Entertainment to whom Packer agreed to sell his company’s Crown shareholding and “thereby obtained an indirect interest in Crown”.
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