Wynn Suing Macau High Roller Over Gambling Debt

Billionaire businessman Steve Wynn reportedly is going after a Chinese high roller for failing to pay back HK$14 million ($1.81 million) after losing it at Wynn’s Macau casino.

According to Reuters, the lawsuit was filed in Hong Kong’s High Court last week.
Li Jun owns a Beijing-based car company.

Macau has been immensely lucrative for casino owners like Wynn, as the former Portuguese colony brought in $38 billion last year in gaming revenue. It is expected to best that total this year. For comparison, the entire state of Nevada brings in around $11 billion per year from its gambling clientele.

Lending credit to high rollers, or “whales” as they are more derogatorily referred to, is a common practice for casino firms. In Nevada, millions are written off each year in so-called bad debt — the money that the casinos fail to collect from such players.

However, like in the example of Wynn’s lawsuit, sometimes they go after people for debts.

Last month in the Silver State, a former high roller was the first to take a gambling debt case to the Nevada Supreme Court. The businessman in that case was sentenced to time in prison for what prosecutors said was fraud, but the defense appealed the verdict citing how it’s unconstitutional to send people to prison for an inability to repay debts.

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