You have to wonder whether there’s something in the water at “Star Entertainment”, and not just in the free drinks it gives to high rollers to the point they vomit on themselves and have to be hauled out of the VIP lounge.
Star went through a near-death experience during the first Bell inquiry in 2022, which found the company was unsuitable to hold a licence given its predilection for links with organised crime, misleading banks, breaching anti-money-laundering laws, evading taxes and facilitating banned gambling transactions. At the time, the NSW gambling regulator referred to the company’s “breathtaking institutional arrogance”. But Star survived, after mass executive and board changes and the imposition of a “special manager” by the regulator.
Did that do anything to change the company’s breathtaking arrogance? Not a jot. It’s back before Adam Bell again, with a cavalcade of evidence that the company remains the same. When a cash machine spewed money out to gamblers for weeks — the best moment in Australian money laundering since Westpac broke the law 23 million times — the response of the company, according to departed chief financial officer Christina Katsibouba, was to ask her to doctor the company’s accounts to hide the millions lost.
Katsibouba is just one of several disgruntled executives who have left the company, unhappy over its unchanging culture. The company also refused to comply with a deadline for handing over documents to the new inquiry, instead dumping them weeks after it was supposed to, while witnesses were giving evidence.
But the real demonstration of Star’s refusal to change was in the text messages between chair David Foster and then CEO Robbie Cooke, who quit in March. Foster told Cooke in January that the casino regulator was “prepping for war” and that the company should do the same. The basis of the conclusion that the regulator was “prepping for war” was that Star staff had accessed the diary of special manager Nicholas Weeks to find out with whom he was meeting. They didn’t just spy on Weeks; they plotted to get rid of him via a ginned-up class action suit against him.
To the latest inquiry, Weeks separately told of the company falsifying documents and not bothering to check on high-risk clients.
Fronting up to the inquiry this week, Foster tried to explain away his messages to Cooke: it was in the “heat of the moment”; it was really about the unfairness of how Star was treated versus pubs and clubs; he was too “trigger happy” and shouldn’t have said it; the messages were — inevitably — taken out of context.
Why has experience not chastened the board and management of Star, even when there’s been a near-complete turnover?
A key reason is they know they have the backing of the Minns government. Star was allowed to continue after the first Bell inquiry under the Perrottet government. But NSW Labor nailed its colours to the mast last August when — with the support of the pro-gambling Fairfax press — it cut a particularly grubby deal with Star that reduced tax for the company in exchange for maintaining jobs. Labor and Fairfax were particularly exercised that the Perrottet government hadn’t asked Star how much tax it thought it should pay — a staggering example of state capture by the gambling industry.
An extraordinary part of the deal — one that occasioned minimal criticism or coverage — was that it elevated the United Workers Union to the status of industry regulator. “The agreed jobs guarantee will be overseen by the United Workers Union,” the government said in its announcement, effectively guaranteeing that the whole exercise would be for the benefit of the UWU.
No wonder Star thought it could continue treating the actual regulator with contempt — it had the government, and a key union, right behind it, dedicated to propping it up so UWU members could keep their jobs.
The subsequent behaviour of Star makes that deal now look even more sordid. Labor and the UWU have allied themselves with a company so arrogant that the only regulatory solution is corporate execution by the removal of its licence. How will the Minns government prop up Star if Bell finds it is incapable of ever reforming itself sufficiently to be trusted with its gambling licence?
Maybe it can encourage Victorian pokies, grog and pub tycoon Bruce Mathieson, who currently owns nearly 10% of Star, to take over the whole shitshow — provided he looks after the UWU, of course.
