Casino operator Caesars Entertainment Corp (CEC) reported its “best quarterly earnings margins since 2007” in Q1, which may well be true, provided you have a Turing-level capacity to decode seemingly random strings of numbers.

CEC’s earnings reports have been comparing apples to oranges ever since January’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by its main unit, Caesars Entertainment Operating Co (CEOC), into which CEC had bundled most of its industry-high $23b debt. Nowadays, CEC takes a Sgt. Schultz know-nothing approach to what goes on behind CEOC’s doors, choosing to focus on ‘continuing’ operations at its (for the moment) non-bankrupt units.

Freed from worrying about those pesky half-billion quarterly interest payments, CEC reported a $15m profit in the three months ending June 30. Revenue was up 17.4% to $1.14b thanks to contributions from the new Horseshoe Baltimore and The Cromwell in Las Vegas, plus “exceptional” growth at its burgeoning digital operations.

Newly installed CEO Mark Frissora said the company had delivered a “strong” performance on a “system-wide” basis. However, that system doesn’t include CEOC, where revenue fell 2% during the quarter, underscoring the extent to which CEC loaded all its profitable properties into lifeboats before abandoning the leaky CEOC to its fate.