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.

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).