Chinese police arrested19 Crown employees in October 2016, of whom 16 were later jailed for illegally promoting gambling in the country,prompting an immediate investigation by the VCGLR which only produced a confidential final report in February this year.
The royal commission heard the VCGLR ordered Crown to produce internal documents relevant to the arrests and interviewed senior Crown executives,who denied there had been warning signs its staff were at risk in China ahead of the co-ordinated arrests.
But Mr Bryant said it became clear that was untrue as he obtained more documents from Crown,often only after they had been produced for a shareholder class action stemming from the China arrests,and in evidence in last year’s damning NSW Bergin inquiry into Crown.
“I suppose I was giving Crown,when I was conducting the interviews,the benefit of the doubt at the time to give their position — I didn't have access to a lot of material at that stage,” Mr Bryant said. “In hindsight though,I certainly consider that at times they lied to me at interview with what they were aware of and what they weren’t aware of.”
The VCGLR is responsible for policing Crown Melbourne and has been criticised for either not knowing about or failing to prevent money laundering and other probity issues at the sprawling Southbank casino which were uncovered in theBergin inquiry. The inquiry found Crown unfit to hold the licence for its new Sydney casino.
Mr Bryant said examples of Crown misleading him included the casino’s then-chief legal officer,Joshua Preston,claiming that the risk intelligence firm,the Mintz Group,had advised Crown in early 2015 that a Chinese government crackdown on gambling related to casino customers and corruption rather than casinos. In fact,Mintz expressly warned that China was targeting “people involved in the gambling business”.
Crown VIP executive Jason O’Connor — who was arrested in the 2016 raids and spent a year in a Shanghai jail — said in an interview he had not read a February 2015 news article titled “China’s president just declared war on global gambling” or been aware of any casino crackdown.