Sydney's Star Casino will face a second major inquiry, less than two years after a damning report found it was unfit to hold a casino licence. Sydney barrister Adam Bell SC has been appointed by the NSW Independent Casino Commission to conduct the review which will conclude in May.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 Well, look, essentially, the commission says that it's really not satisfied that the star
00:06 has done enough to clean up its act, so to speak, after this very damning report, which
00:10 was handed down in 2022. So that report essentially found evidence of money laundering, you know,
00:16 criminal infiltration, and the star hadn't done enough to prevent those things. And so
00:21 what the independent casino commissioner said is that since the manager of the star was
00:26 extended, he had his term extended for the second time in December, it's really not seeing
00:30 the sort of progress that it would like to see to make what the commission describes
00:34 as the deep structural changes that are needed at the casino to prevent this. So this essentially,
00:40 this new inquiry will be looking back at the original report, which was done in 2022, and
00:44 what progress has been made since then. So it's not necessarily that fresh allegations
00:48 have arisen, specifically, but obviously, there is concern that some of the things that
00:53 we saw were happening in that inquiry could still be going on if the culture hasn't changed
00:57 and the procedures haven't changed enough at the casino.
01:00 Okay, so tell us a bit more about the first inquiry's findings.
01:03 Yeah, look, it was pretty damning, those findings, they found clear and obvious evidence that
01:08 money laundering and terrorism financing risks had been ignored for years by management.
01:13 They also found that even during the inquiry itself, some of those managers and those executives
01:18 had given submissions at the start of the inquiry, which actually proved false, and
01:23 were deliberately given to the inquiry to try to mislead. The report also found that
01:28 essentially the star treated the casino regulator with disdain, it just treated it as an obstacle
01:33 that needed to be worked around rather than something that it had to follow. And at the
01:37 time, the Chief Commissioner of the New South Wales Independent Casino Commission said the
01:42 institutional arrogance of the star was just staggering, he'd never seen anything like
01:46 it. At the time as well, the government was criticised because no criminal charges eventuated,
01:51 there were a lot of people, anti-gambling advocates, who felt that given such things
01:56 were being allowed to go on that criminal charges really should have been laid, and
02:00 that there was also quite a bit of outrage that the casino even was able to continue
02:04 operating even though its licence was suspended. It obviously was given some time to clean
02:08 up its act, that was 18 months it was given, that time's now up, and so we see this inquiry.
02:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]