Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is vouching for his government’s decision to withdraw its license approval and tax breaks for James Packer’s proposed $450 million project in Colombo, essentially saying that the country really wasn’t going to make anything out of the deal with the Australian casino titan.

Wickremesinghe also hinted that the only reason Packer received a casino license was because the previous administration, led by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, gave it to him as a political favor. But Packer’s hopes of putting up the resort in the South Asian country was derailed when his proverbial horse (Rajapaksa) lost the election. With the new administration promising to withdraw the casino licenses during its election campaign, it became clear when Wickremesinghe won his third term as prime minister that Crown’s presence in Sri Lanka were numbered.

“We were the only country in the world where casino revenue wasn’t taxed. It became an issue for us also because all religious leaders opposed it,” Wickremesinghe told The Australian. “[Packer] decided to go ahead despite wide opposition because he felt his friendship with the Rajapaksa regime was sufficient and the Rajapaksa regime would be there forever. So you played politics, that’s all. There’s nothing to complain about.”

Wickremesinghe didn’t outrightly call Packer’s business dealings with the previous government as corrupt, but he did lament the lack of transparency that came with the casino bidding process and the perceived crony capitalism that was allegedly running amok in the previous administration. “There will be inquiries into some of these business companies associated with corruption. In a truly capitalist system there can’t be corruption. There has to be genuine competition,” he said.

And despite basically shuttling Packer out the door, Wickremesinghe maintained that foreign companies, including Australian investors, are more than welcome to go do business in Sri Lanka, highlighting that his administration would make sure that it would have an “open and transparent investment climate.”

“We are putting a new investment regime in place. We want to encourage direct foreign investment in the real economy, in manufacturing, agriculture and the services sectors,” Wickremesinghe added.

Casino operator Genting Singapore got badly beaten up in Q4 by its VIP gamblers, who helped push company profits down by nearly a third.

Revenue in the three months ending Dec. 31 slipped just 8% to S$637.9m, but earnings fell 17% to $166m and net profit after tax fell 30% to $118.9m. Things were a little brighter on the full year front, with revenue up 1% to $2.86b, earnings down 3% to $836m and profit down 10% to $635m.

The company, which operates Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) in Singapore and recently broke ground on its Resorts World Jeju project in South Korea, blamed its Q4 slide on high rollers with hot hands. The company said RWS’ mass and premium mass segments displayed “respectable growth” but the VIP business experienced “significant below average win percentage and rolling volume.”

Taking a page from Crown Resorts’ book, Genting argues that if you applied theoretical normalized hold percentages to its VIP business, earnings would have risen by close to a third. Sadly, we don’t live on Theoretical Normalized Earth, where Brad Pitt is a lot less handsome and the rest of us are a lot less fugly.

Speaking of fugly, Genting’s bad debt provisions were up, up and away as more high-rollers proved unable or unwilling to honor their casino markers. For Q4, bad debts were up nearly 43% to $82m while the full year figure was up nearly 42% to $185m.

Genting’s results are all the more fugly given the stellar Q4 numbers posted by their crosstown rival, Marina Bay Sands (MBS). The Las Vegas Sands property posted revenue gains of over 27% in Q4. MBS also enjoyed a 98.3% occupancy rate while RWS could manage only 93%.

Genting acknowledged that “the business environment around us has changed rapidly and we face stiff competition,” both in Singapore and from other regional players all chasing the same dwindling supply of high-rollers. Genting says the “macro-economic ecosystem has been altered to an extent that the gaming industry has to adjust to a new norm.” These adjustments include RWS “reorganizing its gaming programmes to focus marketing initiatives towards the foreign premium mass and mass market segments.”

Raising for Effective Giving has released their Q4 numbers and it seems the poker community is determined to provide relief for all sentient beings on the planet, not just humans.

125-years ago whale blubber was used to light up our homes. It was the main source of fuel. We wanted to see what we were doing. Extermination of the species was merely an after thought.

A lot has changed since then.

I can now buy a light bulb for a few bucks.

No need to kill the whales.

But we keep killing them anyway.

We keep getting between the sheets. Women are like Pez dispensers. There are babies everywhere. More mouths mean more food. Global livestock production is big business. But it’s also a terrible business. And it’s not just the animals that are suffering. So is our planet.