Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson.
VEGAS INC Coverage
Securities lawsuit attorneys appear to be in pile-on mode, hitting the directors of Las Vegas Sands Corp. and International Game Technology with new lawsuits alleging mismanagement and negligence.
The latest lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for Nevada in Las Vegas on Monday against Las Vegas Sands Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson and his fellow directors.
The plaintiff in this case is shareholder the Louisiana Municipal Police Employees Retirement System and it’s represented by Reno attorney Curtis Coulter and a firm in Radnor, Pa., called Barroway Topaz Kessler Meltzer & Check LLP.
Like an April 1 shareholder "derivative" lawsuit, seeking to force the company to sue its own directors to recover damages for the benefit of the company, the new lawsuit says the directors failed to ensure management was staying out of trouble in China.
These suits relate to Las Vegas Sands’ firing of its Macau CEO, Steven Jacobs, who fired back with allegations of improper conduct by the company in China.
"As a result of the alleged improper and illegal conduct, Las Vegas Sands and its Macau subsidiary are currently being investigated by a number of U.S. federal and state civil and criminal authorities" as well as the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, the new lawsuit says.
On top of that, Adelson’s public comments that he discovered a transfer of $5 million between Macau and Singapore prompted an investigation by Singapore regulators of junket operators and Singapore’s two casinos, including Sands’ Marina Bay Sands, the lawsuit complained.
The suit accuses the Las Vegas Sands directors of breach of fiduciary duty, charging they knowingly "allowed the company to engage in the improper and illegal business practices, as alleged."
The company hasn’t yet responded to these two new lawsuits.
These two suits are on top of shareholder lawsuits that are pending in federal court in Nevada over different claims involving Las Vegas Sands’ stock falling from $144 in 2007 to less than $2 per share in early 2009 as the company worked through liquidity issues related to its massive expansion in Asia.
Separately, attorneys filed another derivative complaint on April 8 against IGT’s directors. This suit, with plaintiff shareholder Lawrence Arduini, was filed by attorney Mark Gunderson in Reno and attorneys with the firm Johnson Bottini LLP in San Diego.
Like a group of existing lawsuits against IGT the latest lawsuit complains that the directors, as early as November 2007, caused the company to make false or misleading statements about the company’s business practices while "several of them sold and pocketed $22.4 million of personally held stock."
Attorneys for IGT and the directors have denied these allegations and last week asked that this suit be assigned to U.S. District Judge Edward Reed Jr. in Reno.
Reed since 2009 has handled five derivative lawsuits against IGT directors, one shareholder class-action against the company and two class actions filed by employee investors.
The employee lawsuits complain IGT induced them into investing in IGT stock for their company-sponsored retirement plans, only to see the stock value decline.