Crown Resorts no longer sharing confidential info with James Packer

Ahead of its annual shareholder meeting, Crown Resorts said in a statement it had terminated two agreements it had with Consolidated Press Holdings, including the sharing of confidential information with stakeholder James Packer.

Under the October 2018 agreement, Packer was given confidential information that was not shared with other shareholders. The other agreement, dated June 2016, which established that Packer’s company CPH provided services to Crown, was also torn up.

Consolidated Press Holdings holds a 36.8% stake in Crown, the Guardian reports.

The shareholder meeting will be held on Thursday during and directors of the company are expected to face significant votes against their re-election.

The casino operator is the subject of a New South Wales inquiry into whether the company is fit and proper to hold a gaming license for its planned Sydney casino.

The inquiry on Wednesday heard that the former Crown Resorts chairman, Rob Rankin, should be referred to the corporate regulator for it to investigate whether he breached his duties as a director.

Rankin may have breached his duties by allegedly failing to tell the rest of the board about the risk that Chinese authorities would act against Crown staff in China, and threats Packer made to a businessman in 2015 while the casino magnate was attempting to privatise the group, the counsel assisting the inquiry, Scott Aspinall, said.

Packer has admitted the threats – made in emails that Rankin was copied into – were “shameful” and “disgraceful”. He told the inquiry they were made while he was dealing with a serious illness.

All current directors of Crown and some of its past directors have given evidence to the New South Wales Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority inquiry.

Aspinall said Rankin had refused to give evidence and efforts to serve a summons on him in England, where he is living, had failed. Rankin was chairman of Crown between August 2015 and January 2016 and remained a director until June 2016.

Aspinall told the inquiry’s commissioner, Patricia Bergin SC, that on the evidence before her it was open to her to find Rankin failed, without justifiable reason, to notify the rest of the board about concerns he held about the fate of staff in China, where authorities were cracking down on casino promoters.

Nineteen Crown staff were arrested in China in 2016 on charges of illegally promoting gambling. They pleaded guilty to the charges. Rankin’s alleged failure to put the company “on high alert” meant the board did not “implement appropriate mechanisms to protect the staff in China”, the counsel assisting said.

Aspinall also noted that “Mr Rankin failed, without justifiable reason, to notify his colleagues on the Crown board of serious threats made by Mr Packer in November 2015”.

“In those circumstances, you may choose to recommend to the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority that it consider referring Mr Rankin to Asic for possible breaches of section 180 of the Corporations Act 2001,” he said.

Aspinall said the commission had tried to get Rankin to give evidence.

“In correspondence since July 2020, he has through his solicitors firstly refused to answer any questions posed to him in writing, secondly refused to accept service outside the jurisdiction of a summons to give evidence to this inquiry and thirdly refused to give evidence consensually from a remote location,” he said.

The NSW inquiry comes after Nine Entertainment in 2019 reported allegations including that there had been criminal involvement with junket operators at Crown facilities.

For the past week and a half, the inquiry has been grilling directors of the company who were billed as being “independent” of Packer over the billionaire’s influence on the board and the management of the company.

Earlier on Wednesday, the inquiry heard from the former Crown Resorts director Geoff Dixon, who has admitted that allegations made as long ago as 2014 that junket operators had links to organised crime were correct.

The former Qantas boss, who joined the Crown board from the Packer family’s Publishing and Broadcasting Limited when it was spun out as a separate company in 2007 and retired in October last year, was giving evidence to the inquiry on Wednesday.

He was, like all but two current Crown directors, appointed on the recommendation of the company’s biggest shareholder, James Packer.

“James Packer asked me” to join the board, Dixon said.

The inquiry has also been asking directors to justify their decision to publish a newspaper advertisement in late July 2019 attacking Nine’s coverage – an advertisement the inquiry has heard contained incorrect information – and exploring what they knew about the risks of organised crime infiltration and money laundering.

Dixon, whose roles on the board over the years included chairing the risk and remuneration committees, said he could not remember an episode of Four Corners alleging links between organised crime junket operators at casinos Crown operated in Macau as part of a joint venture with Hong Kong’s Melco Resorts.

“I don’t spend all my time reading all the newspapers or watching TV and believing all I see,” he said. “There’s a certain amount of scepticism about that.”

However, Aspinall said that “the evidence that has been heard through the inquiry is that the allegations they made were correct – at least in regards to some of the junkets”.

“I concede that, yes,” Dixon replied.

He said several specific allegations of criminal involvement in junkets or money laundering through Crown’s casinos were not brought to the risk committee that he chaired. “On numerous occasions we got assurances from senior executives that we were in no way pushing money laundering, that we were clean,” Dixon said.