Watchdogs want US Senate to probe Sands/Adelson’s ties to Chinese triads

adelson-campaign-for-accountabilityA watchdog group has asked the US Senate to probe Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson’s ties to a Macau casino junket figure.

On Tuesday, the Campaign for Accountability (CfA) asked the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Federal Election Commission to investigate Sands and Adelson’s ties to Chinese crime groups.

Specifically, the CfA wants to know if “illegally laundered foreign funds” make up some of Adelson’s notoriously large Republican campaign contributions. US laws prohibit foreigners from contributing to US election campaigns and CfA Executive Director Anne Weismann says the American people have a right to know if “triad money is winding up in the campaign coffers of U.S. politicians through Mr. Adelson’s contributions.”

The CfA singles out Sands’ business ties to Cheung Chi Tai, who, according to varying accounts, either was or still is a prime figure in the Neptune Group junket operation. A couple decades ago, a US Senate committee fingered Cheung as the leader of a Hong Kong triad group. Cheung is currently facing charges of money laundering in Hong Kong related to his junket activity.

Cheung’s name came up during this summer’s wrongful dismissal court case involving former Sands China CEO Steve Jacobs, who claimed he was fired in 2010 for asking too many questions about Sands’ connections with allegedly sketchy characters.

Among the documents introduced in the Jacobs’ case was a background investigation Sands had commissioned on Cheung. The CfA had petitioned the court for the public release of the so-called Vickers Reports but US District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez rejected the request based on her opinion that the documents contained sensitive commercial and gaming information.

The CfA also wants the Senate to investigate Sands/Adelson’s ties to Ng Lap Seng, the Chinese billionaire who was arrested in New York in September on charges of smuggling $4.5m in cash into the country. Ng, another alleged triad member named in the Jacobs case for his business dealings with Sands, allegedly funneled money to the Democratic National Committee during the 1990s.

Adelson is one of the world’s wealthiest individuals and personally contributed around $100m to Republican candidates in the 2012 election cycle. Last month, the Center For Responsive Politics identified Sands as the number one corporate donor to political parties, and all of its donations go to the GOP.

Sands spokesman Ron Reese called the CfA’s press release “an obvious political stunt” while claiming that the CfA’s allegations were nothing new and had already been debunked.