Corporate
M&A, leadership changes, and strategic moves across the industry.
Ten days after closure notices gave the Maverick Casino Hotel and the Gold Country Inn until 30 November, Maverick's co-founder says he is buying both back and will rehire every worker. No price, buyer entity or court filing for the deal has been made public, and Nevada's regulator says only that it is "very involved".
IZI Finance, the Maltese group that runs the island's National Lottery and the Dragonara Casino, took more than €1 billion in stakes in a year for the first time and doubled its pre-tax profit to €14.4 million. Its lottery concession has under six years left to run, and the bond it sold in March to fund growth abroad runs almost four years beyond it.
A Racing Post count of every British race title shows bookmakers sponsoring 17% fewer races this year, with the cuts deepening after Remote Gaming Duty went to 40% in April. It lands three weeks before a Budget that may raise machine games duty, which would hit racing harder.
Kangwon Land has no limit on how often a casino member's points card can be replaced, and says it cannot check replacement records against its misuse records, according to data released by a lawmaker during the National Assembly's audit season. The worry is "comp-kkang", the resale of casino points for cash that goes back into gambling.
Every one of the nine gaming suppliers in the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers' index pulled it down in September, led by Aristocrat and Light & Wonder. The index is now 5.9% lower than a year ago while the S&P 500 is up 14.4%.
Nevada's Gaming Control Board has backed Christopher Ruffin at Circus Circus and Sean Lanni at Aria and Park MGM, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. One is licensing work he already does; the other, by his own account, wants the licence mainly for estate planning.
The finance chief who took The Lottery Corporation through its demerger from Tabcorp and raised the debt for its A$1.145 billion Victorian licence extension will leave on 1 July 2027. His successor inherits a job that, since this year's restructure, also covers legal, risk, cyber and technology.
Alex Frost, who led the racehorse owners' purchase of the Tote from Betfred in 2019, will hand over to former GiG and DraftKings executive James Coxon at the end of 2026. In the same announcement the Tote is closing its online gaming and cutting back a consumer digital business that its latest accounts show made an EBITDA loss of £11.9 million.
Yonhap, citing an unnamed source, says Grand Korea Leisure's marketing staff and executives have been meeting customers in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Mongolia without proper legal review, 11 years after Chinese police arrested Korean casino staff for recruiting gamblers. GKL says its staff serve existing customers and recruit no one.
Data obtained by an opposition lawmaker show Kangwon Land's slot machine manufacturing business has run at a loss every year since 2020, while a Philippine sales office that cost about ₩700 million found no new distributors. The losses total about $11.1 million, not the $236 million some English-language reports have carried.
A week after the same notices went out in Washington, Maverick's Nevada arm has told the state it will permanently close the Maverick Casino Hotel and the Gold Country Inn in Elko unless a new operator takes them over. Court filings show both sit in the sale-leaseback portfolio that drew no bids in the company's bankruptcy.
Galaxy Entertainment Group's chairman bought 4.6 million shares for cash on the first trading day after Macau's weakest monthly gaming revenue of the year, paying less than the stock traded for on the exchange that day. The filing shows the price; it does not show who sold.