UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal reported that Sands had agreed to pay Jacobs between $75m and $100m to settle the suit.
Casino operator Las Vegas Sands has settled the nearly six-year-old wrongful termination suit brought by former Sands China CEO Steve Jacobs (pictured, far right).
On Tuesday, Sands China filed papers with the Hong Kong Exchange announcing a “confidential settlement of legal proceedings” between the company and Jacobs. The terse statement says, in its entirety:
“On or about May 31, 2016, the parties to the Proceedings reached a comprehensive and confidential settlement through which Mr. Jacobs dismissed all claims in the Nevada state and federal cases against our controlling shareholder, Las Vegas Sands Corp., the Company, our subsidiary Venetian Macau Limited, and Mr. Sheldon Gary Adelson and released all claims as of that date.”
Jacobs was unceremoniously ousted from Sands China in July 2010 for still murky reasons, despite having been credited by Las Vegas Sands COO Michael Leven only one year earlier for having “saved the ship” that was Sands China. Jacobs filed his wrongful termination suit that October and an extremely nasty war of words and writs ensued.
From the start, it appeared that the deep-pocketed Adelson’s strategy appeared to be delay, delay, delay in the belief that Jacobs would eventually run out of money, patience or both. Jacobs retaliated by releasing info on the seamier side of Sands China’s affairs, alleging that Adelson (pictured, with resting bitch-face) had personally approved a ‘prostitution strategy’ at Sands’ Macau properties.
More damaging were allegations regarding Sands’ sketchy financial dealings with Chinese consultants, ties to junket operators with reported links to Hong Kong’s triads and efforts to dig up dirt on Macau officials for future “leverage.” These allegations ultimately earned Sands hefty fines from both federal and state regulators.
Jacobs was also coming off well in court, winning procedural battles over the admissibility of evidence, while Adelson was earning verbal rebukes from the judge handling the case. Adelson responded by unsuccessfully attempting to have Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez removed from the case, while (possibly) buying a newspaper to cast public doubts about her impartiality.
The courts ultimately concluded that Nevada, not Macau, was the proper venue in which to hear the case, which had been set to commence later this year. The possibility of Jacobs exposing even scarier skeletons in Sands’ closets in a court of law appears to have proven the point at which Adelson’s cost-benefit analysis of continuing this fight went into the red.
Then again, Adelson plans to spend this fall trying to put Donald ‘tiny hands, big mouth’ Trump into the White House, so perhaps Adelson felt that’s a big enough challenge without the Jacobs’ distraction.
