SEARCH NEWS:

 

Inside Gaming Column: Apparent Leak Sets Off Alarm Bells

Compliance officers for Wall Street investment bankers were ringing alarm bells last week over the apparent leak of information from Harrah's Entertainment to The Wall Street Journal. Several investment bank analysts were saying Harrah's executives gave the national daily newspaper inside information about negotiations to buy Caesars Entertainment. Federal Securities and Exchange Commission and New York Stock Exchange regulations prohibit the selective disclosure of inside information to anyone for any purpose, and federal law makes it a crime.

¥ ¥ ¥

Speaking of the $9.4 billion Caesars Entertainment sale, Harrah's Entertainment President Gary Loveman kept making references to "Hyde" in a conference call with analysts Thursday, as in setting a price for "Hyde shares." What was that about? It seems the super-secretive executive code named the deal "Jekyll and Hyde" while the negotiations were going on to try to increase his chances of keeping a secret. Friendly! It also seems as if someone was a little sloppy in not cleaning up his script.

¥ ¥ ¥

Las Vegas developer Steve Wynn just has to do things his way. Just look at the rooms he has planned at Wynn Las Vegas. They're not laid out bath, bed and living areas, like Sheldon Adelson's at The Venetian and every other resort Wynn has built. Oh, no. They're about the same size, but they're clustered with living area and sleeping space bunched together in a square rather than a rectangle. Wynn thinks guests are going to love it. Us? We'd never second-guess the public.

¥ ¥ ¥

Speaking of Wynn, it seems the Las Vegas Country Club just doesn't want him as a partner. Wynn's wife, Elaine, wrote her fellow club members this month that she and Wynn wanted to buy the landmark links simply to offer it their "very high standards." But the board responded days later with proposed rules changes, in effect a poison pill, conferring added powers on itself. At the same time, club President David Smith returned his check for $50,000, which apparently had been accepted on the contingency that a deal was done with Wynn. He wasn't available for comment.

¥ ¥ ¥

Who'd we forget? Last week, we reported Wall Street is more impressed with the new billion-dollar players in Las Vegas than with any talk about megamergers and monopolies. But we didn't include former Horseshoe Gaming Holding Corp. owner Jack Binion, who's sitting in his office in Summerlin with the billion dollars or so he made from selling his company to Harrah's Entertainment. Industry experts warn he won't be sitting on the sidelines for long. More to come.

The Inside Gaming column is compiled by Gaming Wire Editor Rod Smith. You can contact him by phone at (702) 477-3893, fax (702) 387-5243 or e-mail at rsmith@reviewjournal.com.

Copyright GamingWire. All rights reserved.

< Gaming News