Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, 81, is listed as a witness at a hearing starting Monday, in a lawsuit brought by the former Sands China CEO Steven Jacobs, Bloomberg reported.
Jacobs claims he was fired for refusing illegal demands from his employers, which he says were that he find clandestine financial and business information about top Macau government officials, to be used to “exert leverage.”
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Adelson denies the allegation, and he also denies Jacobs’s claim that he, Adelson, initiated installing prostitutes at the Macau casinos. Adelson called Jacobs’s allegations “outright lies and fabrications.” He blamed on Jacobs the operation of digging up dirt on Macau officials.
“I never asked or authorized Jacobs to conduct a private investigation of or ‘create a dossier’ on Macanese officials, ” Adelson said in an press release in 2013. “We believe unequivocally that Jacobs initiated the investigation on his own for his own purposes.”
Sands’ official response to the claims is that Jacobs was dismissed for engaging in unauthorized deals against company policy.
The court will allow Jacobs to present as evidence the report of a so far unnamed risk consultant about supposed connections between Sands China business associates and organized crime.
Bloomberg cites court filings that suggest one report, commissioned by Sands China, targeted an alleged organized crime figure who used VIP rooms in Macau casinos. Another report to Sands China exposed a Hong Kong movie producer with possible ties to a Chinese organized-crime society (triad). A third report was on Macau officials.
Jacobs said in court filings that the reports exposed the company to “serious political and legal problems.”
Adelson’s company claims Jacobs stole the reports, which they admit contain “extremely sensitive, highly confidential information, ” and an attorney for Sands China said about Jacobs’s use of them: “In some cases, they would call this blackmail.”
