Forbes – Sheldon Adelson, the nation’s 11th richest person and chief executive of casino company Las Vegas Sands LVS +0.7%, says he is determined to stop online gambling in America and he will go to great lengths to battle the corporate interests pushing for it. “I am willing to spend whatever it takes,” Adelson said in his first interview since The Washington Post revealed that he had hired an army of lawyers and lobbyists to try to convince Congress to ban online gambling. “My moral standard compels me to speak out on this issue because I am the largest company by far in the industry and I am willing to speak out. I don’t see any compelling reason for the government to allow people to gamble on the Internet and nobody has ever explained except for the two companies whose special interest is going to be served if there is gaming on the Internet, Caesars and MGM.”
Adelson’s effort to launch an advocacy group, the Coalition To Stop Internet Gambling, has shocked a casino industry that has been gearing up for a big push into online gambling in states like New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada—and maybe beyond. One of the nation’s top political donors, Adelson first openly declared his opposition to online gambling in a June article he wrote for Forbes, in which he claimed online gambling would cause people to lose their homes. He spent enormous amounts of money on the 2012 presidential election and is now preparing to use his financial firepower to push a legislative agenda connected to his business like never before. While Adelson is closely identified with Republican Party politics, his campaign against online gambling is a bipartisan effort, headed by former Republican governor George Pataki, together with Democrats Blanche Lincoln, the former Arkansas senator, and Wellington Webb, the former mayor of Denver. “I won’t go into the business because it’s a moral issue for me,” says Adelson about online gambling. “If a stockholder said to me ‘your morality can’t count when it comes to making money for shareholders,’ I see it from a business view point as very harmful to all the companies that go into it.”
