Stephen A. Wynn
Analyst · Felicia Hendrix with Barclays
Oh, now I get the point. Well, I think he's right. I mean, places like Nevada and Massachusetts, New Jersey, they have this process that's thorough, sometimes frivolous, ridiculous. One time, one of the jurisdictions insisted that we supply proof of ownership of our automobiles, a marriage certificate from someone who've been married for 55 years, a stuff that became ludicrous. Our submission in Massachusetts was 18,000 pages and weighed 225 pounds. I had some fun with it at our hearing by saying, "I love it so much I take it with me wherever I go." And I'm sure everybody's going to read every one of the 18,000 pages and I think that's the kind of thing that Mr. Adelson was been talking about and whether Toyota or Fuji want to do that. On the other hand, it isn't clear that being a partner with an American company, for example, in Tokyo or Osaka, would subject this -- the Japanese company to the same level of scrutiny in filing the applications. Remember that the law says, for example in Las Vegas and in Massachusetts, that if you are going to participate in the revenue of the local casino in Massachusetts or Nevada, then you must file suitability papers. It does not say that if I have a partner in China that, that partner has to file papers. It specifically does not say that. So if I were to be partners with, let's just pick Toyota, if I was partners with Toyota, Toyota would not be required to be suitable in Las Vegas. What would be -- happen is that if Toyota got in trouble and we were partners with Toyota, and Toyota's executives did something particularly heinous, then Nevada might say to us, "They're not suitable partners for you anymore." But automatically being partners with an American company would not mean that any foreign company, Japanese, South Korean or anyone else, would have to immediately be licensed in America. I know it happened in the case of Pansy Ho. But Pansy volunteered to be licensed in Nevada and was found suitable. The New Jersey people, in a moment of temporary insanity, decided they ought to license her father, or at least the impression they were doing that, a ridiculous thing. And I think they're going to change their minds and find MGM suitable again from what I hear. But that was an exception. And so what Sheldon Adelson says is conceivably a problem, but I don't think automatically is a problem.