Monthly Archives: March 2017

Cordish Gaming’s €2.2b Madrid casino plan rejected as unviable

Casino operator Cordish Companies’ plan to build a €2.2b resort in Spain have hit a major stumbling block after Madrid officials rejected the plan as unviable.

Last December, Cordish announced plans to build a major casino, hotel and resort complex on 134 hectares of land near Madrid’s Barajas airport, which would operate under the name Live! Resorts Madrid. It was to be the first international gaming operation for Cordish, whose stateside properties include the popular Maryland Live.

On Friday, Madrid’s Minister of Economy, Employment and Finance, Engracia Hidalgo issued a statement saying that a “profound, serious and rigorous” review of the Cordish proposal had left the government skeptical that the project was “viable from an economic and organizational point of view.”

The statement claimed that the Cordish proposal would require the community to spend €340m to upgrade the surrounding road and rail infrastructure, which would impose a “significant burden” on the community’s budget.

AGTech inks online lottery deal with China’s Alipay

Hong Kong-based lottery technology supplier AGTech Holdings Ltd has inked a deal to operate the Alipay Lottery Channel, if and when the Chinese government allows online lottery sales to resume.

On Friday, AGTech announced it had entered into a 50/50 revenue-sharing deal under which it will distribute and sell regulated lottery products on the Alipay Lottery Channel “in the event that and so long as it is allowed under applicable laws and regulations” in China.

Alipay, a popular third-party online payment processor in China, is a subsidiary of Ant Financial Services Group, which is itself an affiliate of the Alibaba Group, which acquired AGTech in March 2016. In other words, this deal is essentially an in-house arrangement between related parties.

Alibaba’s popular consumer online marketplace Taobao.com used to run a lottery service that reportedly accounted for over 11% of online lottery sales in China. In March 2015, Taobao was forced to halt its online lottery sales in keeping with an edict from China’s Ministry of Finance, which ‘temporarily’ suspended all online sales after uncovering widespread fraud at provincial lottery administration centers.