Caesars’ Bid To Dismiss Creditor Lawsuits Shot Down By Judge

Caesars’ bankruptcy proceedings are becoming increasingly messy, as the proceedings that are legal it threaten its long-term future.
Caesars Entertainment has failed in its bid to possess litigation dismissed by a Delaware judge this week, despite arguing that the ‘material uncertainty’ engendered by the lawsuit against it ‘raises substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as being a going concern.’
It is the casino giant has utilized foreboding language when explaining its long-term future, because it continues to battle its second-lien bondholders over an increasingly complex bankruptcy case.
Caesars Entertainment really wants to put its operating that is main unit Caesars Entertainment Operating Corp. (CEOC), through Chapter 11 proceedings in purchase to restructure its industry-high debt.
However, the second-lien bondholders are suing, claiming that lots of CEOC’s assets were fraudulently transferred to Caesars Entertainment along with other subsidiaries for the advantage of its controlling private equity backers.
We Come to Bury Caesars
This left CEOC with distressed assets as well as an inability to spend it $18 billion debt load, they argue, while placing the many valuable assets out associated with reach of this bondholders. Additionally they accuse the company of creating a ‘good’ Caesars and a ‘bad’ Caesars; one to put up the properties that are valuable the other to put on the debt.
Caesars argues that it paid good value for the assets obtained from the operating device, such as Caesars’s World group of Poker rights, the Octavius Tower, Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Harrah’s New Orleans, Bally’s Las Vegas and the Total Rewards customer commitment program, among others.
Lawyers for the casino giant have asked that the parent company, Caesars Entertainment, be protected from legal action during the program of the bankruptcy filing of CEOC. But on the judge rejected a bid to dismiss or stay the action wednesday.
Beware the Ides of March
It is been a bad couple of months for Caesars. Last week Judge Benjamin Goldgar, that is hearing the case in Chicago, appointed a court-ordered examiner with unlimited time and budget to investigate the asset transfers and any ensuing conflicts of interest.
The initial request for an examiner had come from Caesars itself, but only in relation to seven transfers challenged by the lawsuit. A spokesman for Caesars declined to comment on the decision.
Then, at a hearing of the Gaming Control Board, the business was quizzed by board members regarding the cessation of retirement payments to ex-employees. It’s understood that 63 previous workers, from executive level down, are owed nearly $33 million in retirement payments as part of a supplemental plan the company inherited through previous acquisitions.
Caesars’ attorney Steven Pesner told the board that the company was ‘looking into’ the matter, but also warned that it was facing ‘the largest and a lot of bankruptcy that is complex a generation.’
Carl Icahn Compares Taj Mahal Union Leaders To Mobsters
Carl Icahn said that union leaders are using tactics comparable to those of arranged crime. (Image: Huffington Post)
Carl Icahn has put big money into the Trump Taj Mahal in an attempt to save yourself the Atlantic City casino, but there is been one group he was not regarding the best of terms with, to place it lightly: Unite-HERE Local 54, the union that represents workers at the casino.
Icahn as well as the union have had plenty of harsh words for each other over the past months that are few but Icahn may have just ratcheted up the rhetoric even further.
Letter Calls Casino Contributions Excessive
The Trump Taj Mahal’s future owner called out the union’s leadership, saying that they were essentially extorting money from the casino by picketing the building and attempting to hold on to their previous health plan in a letter sent to members of the union.
‘ Over the final five years, while the Taj Mahal moved bankrupt not simply once, but twice, your Unite-HERE health plan has made $140 million in net income,’ Icahn had written within the letter. ‘Yet even against the backdrop of your employer bankruptcy that is entering the next time in 5 years, your union leadership continues to demand that the Taj make excessive contributions to the profitable Unite-HERE heath plan, or else suffer work unrest.’
Icahn earlier won a ruling from a bankruptcy court that determined he could break current contracts with the union, which would enable him to finish the present health insurance and pension plans that union workers agreed to.
Icahn would instead have workers simply take subsidies and make an application for health care plans under the exchanges create by the Affordable Care Act. The union is appealing this ruling, but Icahn says that if they should win that appeal, he’d likely close the casino.
Icahn Says Tactics Remind Him of ‘Bygone Era’
In the letter, Icahn continued to compare the strategies of union leaders to those of unscrupulous characters of the last.
‘It all reminds me of this bygone period when organized crime would demand grocers pay for protection, or suffer bricks being thrown through their shop windows,’ he composed. ‘ The actual only real real huge difference here is that rather of throwing bricks through the Taj Mahal’s windows, your union instead organizes strikes, picketing, boycotts and other assaults to deter customers from patronizing the Taj Mahal.’
That picketing has continued in present months. Last Friday, union members demonstrated once again, the fifth time they have done therefore since the bankruptcy judge’s decision last October.
‘Carl Icahn has determined to operate the Taj Mahal into the ground while he’s waiting to go over,’ said union president Bob McDevitt. ‘we say we’re not going to simply take this anymore. today’
Icahn Approved to Take Over Taj Mahal
Final Thursday, a bankruptcy judge approved a plan that may see Icahn take control Trump Entertainment Resorts, the moms and dad company of the Taj Mahal. Icahn will swap $286 million worth of debt he has within the ongoing company as a swap for that ownership after the business emerges from bankruptcy.
‘The Taj will stay available,’ stated US Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross at a hearing last week. ‘And it is an effective venture.’
That approval came just days after the casino reached a contract with Donald Trump that will allow the Taj Mahal to keep the Trump name attached to it for the future that is foreseeable. Trump and their daughter, Ivanka Trump, was indeed fighting to have their family name removed through the location.
Assemblyman Pushes For Nevada Lottery
Assemblyman Harvey Munford, who’s got a better chance of winning the lottery than he does of establishing one in Nevada. (Image: yogonet.com)
Assemblyman Harvey Munford desires to bring the lottery to Nevada. Yes, that is right: the gambling money of the global globe doesn’t have a lottery, and that is in big component to the gambling industry of this gambling capital of the entire world, which doesn’t want the competition. It is even written in to the state’s constitution: no lotteries! Very nearly 30 attempts that are legislative establish a lottery in Nevada since 1975 have actually failed.
However, Munford was undeterred as he addressed the Assembly Legislative Operations and Elections Committee this week, arguing that voters, rather compared to casino industry, ought to be offered the chance to decide the problem.
‘ This is a lack of revenue for our state that could be helping the education of our younger constituents,’ he said. ‘It would do this without increasing taxes.’
Long Chances
Members of the vegas press have noted, wryly, that Munford has about as chance that is much of this happen as he has of… well… winning the lottery.
Since, as we now have already established, Nevada does not have a lottery, that would put his approximated chances at zilch, which, in fairness, is slightly worse than those living across the border in California or Arizona.
Nevada’s prohibition of lotteries was founded at statehood in 1864 and has remained sacrosanct since, although it was amended by voters in 1990 to allow charity lotteries. Munford’s Assembly Joint Resolution No. 6 wants to scrap the ban and embrace a state lottery as a means of supporting general public education and promoting the ‘health and welfare of senior citizens.’
‘I know it’s been introduced sessions that are several i have been up here, and each time it’s always passed away. It is never been able to go ahead,’ said Munford, that is due to step down from office at the end associated with the current legislative session. ‘I just said, ‘I’m gonna give it another shot.’
Conservatives Aghast
Nevertheless, any legislation that proposes amending the constitution goes to need an amount that is huge of. The bill will have to pass not only this session of the Legislature but the 2017 session also, before going to vote that is public 2018.
And there is opposition not simply from the casino industry but also from conservative associations. Conservative activist Janine Hansen is aghast at the result that the lottery might have in a continuing declare that has one video slot for every single ten residents. ‘It’s devastating for a grouped family members to deal having a person who has a gambling addiction,’ she stated. ‘It destroys the grouped family totally.’
If the issue ever get to public vote, however, it may possibly pass. A 2009 study showed about 70 per cent of voters were in favor. A lottery would bring $48 million a year in profit for their state, research suggests.
Judge Denies Ivey’s Motion To Dismiss Borgata Lawsuit
The Borgata’s lawsuit against Phil Ivey are allowed to continue. (Image: pokerground.com)
Phil Ivey may still come out on ultimately top from the Borgata within the lawsuit over the $9.6 million he won at baccarat having an advantage sorting technique.
But at least for now, a judge has said that the full situation has enough merit that it shouldn’t be tossed out of court totally, meaning the battle over those millions could go on for some time still.
District Court Judge Noel Lawrence Hillman denied a motion from Ivey’s lawyers to dismiss the charges against Ivey and other defendant Cheng Yin Sun, allowing the case to carry on but offering few clues as to which side might have the upper hand in the legal battle.
The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa alleges that Ivey cheated in a number of sessions in which he played baccarat at their casino, including costs of fraud, breach of agreement and violations of RICO racketeering statutes.
Ivey Used Edge Sorting to Beat Casino at Baccarat
A dispute is concerned by the case over four sessions of baccarat that Ivey played in 2012, during which he won the $9.6 million that the Borgata is now attempting to recover from him. Ivey used an approach known as side sorting, in which he obtained conditions for the game where he surely could tell whether a card was high or low also whenever it had been face down.
That gave him an enormous advantage over the casino in a game where the home typically has a small advantage.
This was possible because certainly one of the conditions involved having an eight-deck shoe made up of a certain type of Borgata playing cards: purple-backed cards manufactured by Gemaco. Unknown to the casino, this brand that is particular backs that were perhaps not perfectly cut; when Ivey then asked the dealer to turn high cards 180 degrees, ostensibly for superstitious reasons, he had been then in a position to distinguish those cards even face down.