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conduct into account. It also delayed things so that its separate disciplinary action into these arrests, which turned out to be one of the worst aspects of the casino’s behavior, was not able to be fully finalized until 2021, when a fine of AU$1 million was imposed. That figure, which was the maximum available to the VCGLR at the time, was indicative of the other key factor behind your “how did we get there” question: Our penalties were inadequate and amounted to little more than Crown’s cost of doing business. SP: From what I know from my jurisdiction, legal privilege only applies to communication between the client and their external council. Is that the same in Australia? AS: Pretty much. As the VCGLR found in its “China Arrests” investigation Crown had advice from their external lawyers, and the advice was to the effect: “If you get your China-based promoters to say A rather than B, they should be able to argue that they are not committing a breach of the law” . Now apart from the advice itself, it’s the way the advice is sought and what the brief is to the external lawyers. If, for example, they had asked: “How we can avoid our staff getting arrested in the first place” , one answer could have been to stop doing any marketing at all. And what the Royal Commission concluded – whether the advice was right or wrong - was that Crown relied on a particular legal interpretation of the law which would enable the employees to argue the toss if arrested. And, when it came to applying that advice, Crown decided to permit them to continue operating. The Royal Commission found that it did so notwithstanding that the Chinese government had, at that time, announced a crackdown on foreign casinos soliciting Chinese citizens to gamble abroad and notwithstanding that Crown’s relevant executives decided to defer their own personal travel to China for a period. SP: What else did the Royal Commission bring to light? AS : I think probably the most flagrant behavior of Crown was to enable continuous play on EGMs by letting patrons put plastic
picks into the sides of the machines. As you know, continuous play is a very harmful way of playing for certain people, but when we formally directed them to stop the behavior, their response was baffling. Having given the direction to them, they came back and effectively said, “Ah, okay, we will interpret that as applying only to some picks, not to others. The Crown picks that we give to EGM players, with the company logo on, we’ll stop doing that. If they want to put another device which serves the same purpose in a machine, we’re not going to see that as something we’ve been directed to stop.” That example goes to the heart of what they considered compliance to be, yet even post the Royal Commission findings, they were still making that argument for a time. Another very egregious example was the fabrication of invoices to increase the amount of cash that a Chinese player could use to gamble with. This got around the fact that Chinese nationals weren’t allowed to bring as much cash as they wanted from mainland China. The Royal Commission found that: Crown Melbourne “happily assisted its wealthy Chinese patrons to breach the currency laws of their country…. [who] transferred up to $160 million from accounts in China to the Crown Towers Hotel. Purportedly this was to pay for hotel services but in reality it was to spend at the gambling tables…what occurred also contravened local laws and likely allowed money laundering to take place.” The other issue that we discovered was that junket operators had connections with organized crime which was obviously very concerning. SP : What do you see as the main reasons behind these failures? Different factors may have contributed, but what were the main ones. AS: In my personal opinion, there was one thing above all else and the Bergin inquiry’s own recommendations go some way to supporting this; the presence of James Packer as the largest shareholder of Crown. He had started selling down his stake, but I think he still had about 35 percent when the Royal
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IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2025
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