ONE-ON-ONE
How a ‘disgraceful’ casino was rebuilt ANDREW SCOTT , DEPUTY CHAIR AND A COMMISSIONER OF THE VICTORIAN GAMBLING AND CASINO CONTROL COMMISSION, TALKED TO EDITOR-IN CHIEF SIMON PLANZER AND EXPLAINED HOW HE AND HIS COLLEAGUES CLEARED UP CROWN CASINO IN MELBOURNE. Introduction When a Victoria Royal Commission submitted a report of its investigations into Melbourne’s Crown Casino in 2021, it could easily have justified shutting the organization down. Instead, it recommended Crown be given a period of time to mend its ways. Now, nearly four years later, Crown’s name is still above the door in Melbourne as well as in Sydney and Perth. But beyond that, almost everything else about the business has changed. Our 1-on-1 interviewee this edition was one of the team at the Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission (VGCCC) tasked with deciding whether Crown was suitable to continue to hold a casino license in Victoria. Parallel investigations were also held into Crown’s casinos in Sydney and Perth, but it was widely seen that the VGCCC’s decision would be the test case and applied to all the company’s casino operations. Simon Planzer discovers the litany of license condition failures, how Crown was rehabilitated and how a final decision was made to allow the business to continue.
since then even though it’s over six years later, because of everything that’s happened. Back in 2016 there was one glaring shortcoming at Crown, which was that it mismanaged its risk assessment so badly that it allowed some of its employees in China to be arrested and imprisoned for trying to promote Crown to Chinese nationals. This was against Chinese law and Crown had been alerted to that as a risk, so it really represented an egregious error of risk management. The VCGLR commenced an investigation into the situation, but Crown claimed legal professional privilege meaning reams of vital material was withheld. This frustrated the regulator who wasn’t able to look properly into the situation when it conducted its 2018 5-yearly review, stating therein that it could not take the “China Arrests”
Simon Planzer: By now the story of the Crown scandal is well known, but how, in your view, did we get to this point? How was Crown able to slip so far from the regulatory standard that it was supposed to be working to? Andrew Scott: That’s what everybody wanted to know, and the reality is that the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation, which was the predecessor commission to the Gaming and Casino Control Commission, the VGCCC, had been continually thwarted in its job of regulating Crown. It had the task every five years of reviewing Crown’s suitability and whether it was in the public interest. The most recent review was back in 2018: there has still not been a 5-yearly review
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IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2025
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