LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sheldon Adelson: Cotai Strip
built 606 days ago
[T]he strong-willed Adelson met with controversy when the first phase of the Venetian opened in May 1999, before all of its rooms, shops, and other services were ready for business. Adelson blamed the hotel's builder and sued. The builder countersued. Dozens of subcontractors complained loudly that Adelson failed to pay them for millions of dollars worth of work. Meanwhile, Adelson prevented the Culinary Union Local 226, which represented nearly all of the hotel, restaurant, and bar workers in major Strip hotels, from organizing at the Venetian.
Source:
What's ... certain to explode is the Cotai Strip, whose virtues Adelson has championed louder and longer than anyone. Among the prominent recent converts: Stanley Ho. Ho's youngest son, Lawrence, heads a new family joint venture with Australia's richest man, Kerry Packer. Ho and Packer's project in Cotai, the $1 billion City of Dreams, will be designed very much with Adelson in mind. Rather than go "head to head" with the neighboring Venetian, Lawrence has dropped a convention center and large retail complex from his original master plan to focus on building "a special casino" that will sit beneath a giant aquarium. "In conventions, Sheldon Adelson is the master," Lawrence Ho says. "Why would we want to compete with him?"
Source:
After coming to the commission, she [Yvonne Atkinson Gates] [M]anaged to earn Sheldon Adelsonâs wrath, which probably makes her the rule rather than the exception. The Venetian boss tends to dislike Democrats and union supporters. He ... accused her of using her position to pressure him to s upport her interestsâa frozen daiquiri business that might have gone into several Strip hotels. The Ethics Commission reprimanded her for that and later for using her position to help her friends, and for failing to disclose her connections and abstain from voting on them (a judge later overturned the Ethics Commissionâs ruling)...
Source:
Adelson, who plans to re-create the Las Vegas Strip on the 1.8 mile-Cotai Strip, is hoping the opening of Venetian can trigger a jump in the non-gambling portion of casino operators' revenue. Gambling income currently makes up about 95 percent of Macau operators' earnings, according to Ken Yeung, a Hong Kong-based analyst at BOCI Securities Ltd.
Source:
Adelson said he had little trouble conveying his vision and encouraging hotel operators to build on Cotai. Many of the hotel sites could be under construction by 2007. One 15-acre site controlled by Las Vegas Sands remains in development negotiations.
Source:
Dressed nattily in a custom-made Brioni suit with a bright purple striped tie and matching handkerchief, Adelson talked enthusiastically about the future of gambling. The billionaire has built his empire on the premise of changing the status quo.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Cotai Strip