William Hill has announced the rebranding of its acquired Australian betting firms Sportingbet, Centrebet and TomWaterhouse under its name.

Sportingbet’s existing clients will be migrated to its new local website WilliamHill.com.au while Centrebet and TomWaterhouse.com will also be rebranded as William Hill in due course.

“This is the exciting first step towards merging three Australian betting brands into one highly regarded, international brand. Placing all of our assets behind one brand will allow us to provide our customers with the best possible wagering experience and more diverse betting opportunities,” Tom Waterhouse, CEO of William Hill Australia said. “William Hill has a rich history in betting on racing and sports, and the brand will enable us to leverage decades of global wagering expertise and understanding to help us establish the best possible product for punters in Australia.”

Waterhouse is the new CEO of William Hill Australian and has been dynamic in shaping the image of William Hill by reconfiguring its marketing strategy and transforming the three acquired firms into one platform.

William Hill acquired the Sportingbet Australia business, which included Centrebet, in March 2013 followed by TomWaterhouse.com’s acquisition in August 2013.

Meanwhile, Paddy Power Australian-facing brand Sportsbet, which has recently come under fire after it took bets on “what name the former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner would take if he was to undergo a gender transition”, apologized but stayed firm on its decision to turn Jenner’s personal life into gambling.

The betting company received criticism from trans advocates. “Sportsbet are clearly engaging in emotional vampirism of the very worst kind,” said Kelley Glanney, a transgender who leads the Carmen Rupe Memorial Trust. “[A] corporation publicly mocking members of a historically-persecuted and still highly-marginalized minority for the sole purpose of driving sales for their online gambling products is simply not acceptable in a civilized 21st century society.”

Let’s say that on January 1, 1967, you took out a 20-year mortgage for a $50,000 house and locked in a constant mortgage rate of 8%. Now let’s say a friend of yours took out the same mortgage for a house of the same price, but he brags to you that he only has to pay 5% because he’s paying a variable rate. What would happen is, 12 years later you’d still be paying 8%. Your friend will be paying 18% and probably be forced to sell the house for a loss so he can escape the mortgage payments.

On a long term basis, this is how Intertain is setting itself up for stable growth. It’s paying higher financing costs now so it can grow faster in the future. Intertain has zero financing risk. All its risks are focused on the business side, which it has much more direct control over than the global economy. So for the next few years, earnings growth will be slow, but expenses will be more or less predictable. Net earnings will not shoot through the roof suddenly, but they will gradually move up year by year. Sometimes Intertain will show a small quarterly loss due to some impairment or other, but on the aggregate, the trend line will slowly turn up as cash flow and business expense race against each other, with cash flow just eking out a win.

It’s no secret that this has been Amaya’s strategy as well, except that Intertain is playing it even safer. Intertain is of course much smaller. Amaya is 9x Intertain’s size. Even before Amaya forked over $4.9B for Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker and its market cap went on a 500% tear, it was still almost twice the size as Intertain is now, and both stocks have had nearly identical runs over the last year. In different fits and starts, yes, but on February 11th at least, the two stocks had posted identical gains of 296% since Intertain began trading last February.

Intertain’s equivalent of a PokerStars megadeal is its $653M acquisition of Gamesys and its collection of online gaming sites. Here is how they are funding it:

13% of the purchase price will be equity financed in new shares issued to Gamesys. Another $420M will be financed through “subscription receipts” to Gamesys, a sort of warrant at $15 per subscription receipt contingent on release conditions, convertible to shares at 1 to 1. The money to turn the

subscription receipt into a share is held in escrow in an interest bearing account at some bank in Canada until those conditions are met, at which point the receipts turn into shares and the holders of the receipts become shareholders. That brings the total up to $505M raised. The rest will come from around $150M in debt. As of last earnings statement, Intertain only had $4.7M Canadian in debt, all fixed, so this will bring debt to equity to 30%, a very manageable sum.

(I have not been able to find if the new debt the company is taking on will be fixed or floating, but judging by management behavior up to now, I assume fixed. If someone would like to go through the French statements and find out, let me know. My French isn’t up to par. Or even double bogey.)

Macau Legend Development Ltd’s potential gaming operations collaboration with Dynam Japan Holdings has fizzled out after the two companies couldn’t agree on “opportunities for business operations” before the pre-imposed memorandum expired earlier this week.

In a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Macau Legend said that despite yielding no positive results from the expired MoU, the two sides remain on positive terms with each other and aren’t shutting the door on a possible partnership down the road.

Part of the MoU included a supposed agreement for Dynam to establish and operate a minimum of 100 pachinko machines and other electronic games at Macau Legend’s Macau Fisherman’s Wharf project. In addition, the two companies were also poised to do cross-marketing promotions, including Dynam marketing Macau Legend’s casinos to its customers in both Japan and South Korea.

The long, drawn-out negotiations between Macau Legend and Dynam Holdings began when the two firms entered into a non-binding memorandum of understanding in August 2013, which was extended twice—first in February 2014 and then again on August 2014—before getting called off on Monday.

Despite not meeting the deadline to hatch out a concrete plan of partnership, it’s still possible that the two companies can re-ignite talks on a working relationship in the future. Dynam Holdings, after all, already has close to $85 million investment in Macau Legend.

Over in South Korea, Kangwon Land Inc, the casino operator that holds the distinction of being the only operator that operates a casino open to local citizens, made steady gains in their net profit from the fourth quarter of 2014. According to the company, net profit from that period surged up to KRW47.4 billion ($43 million), a 69.8% improvement compared to its numbers from a year ago.

The dramatic improvement in net profit from 4Q of 2014 was largely attributed to the casino generating a 12.3% improvement in gross gaming revenue, which amounted to KRW351.8 billion ($317.3 million) in the last three months of the year. The company’s gross gaming revenue accounted for 94.2% of the company’s total revenue, amounting to KRW373.6 billion ($337 million).

The Chinese government is investigating Shao Dongming—CEO of Chinese property development company Dongding Investment—for corruption, specifically his $160 million worth of gambling debts in Macau.

Shao Dongming, known as one of the richest men in Shanghai, has been gambling in Macau since 2011 and nicknamed “The Red King of Gambling” for making multi-million dollar bets.

Shao accumulated a gambling debt amounting to RMB1 billion ($160 million) after gambling during the Chinese New Year 2012 in Macau. The casino tried to negotiate Shao’s debt repayment over a period of time, however, it is alleged that Shao used his connection with the law enforcement to threatened personnel sent by the Macau casinos.

The casino was said to have taken the debt to the court in Macau and asked for Macau Members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative’s assistance to file a complaint to Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCDI).

The political corruption investigation was triggered by the businessman’s close relationship with Shanghainese officials, including the city mayor Yang Xiong. Shao has also held high-level position in CCDI. A report from China’s NDTV said that Shao boasted that “anyone creating trouble for him would end up in jail.”

Given the allegation, the CCDI was said to have received an instruction for a “stringent inspection” into the issue.

President Xi Jinping has vowed to crack down on both “powerful tigers as well as lowly “flies,” warning that corruption was a threat to the Communist Party’s survival.