Caesars Set to Emerge From Bankruptcy

The long-running bankruptcy which has beset Caesars Entertainement Corp. will finally come to an end this weekend as the casino operator announced it will be able to ‘complete its exit from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding as scheduled and by October 6’, according to Casinonewsdaily.com.

Caesars currently currently manages the Harrah’s, Horseshoe and Caesars hotel and casino brands among others and had to delay their announcement on the wake of Sunday’s mass shooting at the nearby Mandaly Bay Casino and Hotel on the Vegas strip which saw 59 people die and hundreds injured, many critically.

Reuters reported that the Caesars’ webcast ‘was scheduled to coincide with a major gaming trade show in Las Vegas, G2E, where some 26,000 visitors gather annually for deal-making’, but that G2E organisers were ‘keeping a close watch on safety after the “horrific events that took place in Las Vegas earlier this morning.”'

The investor webcast, where the announcement was expected to take place, has been delayed for a week or two, but the exit from the ‘prolonged bankruptcy’ cleared its final stumbling block last month when the regulatory bodies of Missouri and Louisiana added their greenlight to that given by shareholders and Nevada’s gaming regulators this summer.

Caesar’s bankruptcy came about as a result of ‘heavy conflict between the company’s creditors and its private equity backers’, with a $24billion debt resulting in a Chapter 11 filing in January 2015, followed by a prolonged period which saw ‘incessant bickering of the involved parties and their failure to agree on a restructuring plan’ as reported by a CasinoNewsDaily staff writer yesterday.

The company’s creditors accused the private equity firms of fraud and asset stripping, which triggered the almost three-year bankruptcy proceeding. It came on the back of an extended downturn in convention business, still blamed by some on remarks made in 2009 by then-President Barack Obama who said:

“You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime.”

Sujit Indap of the Financial Times described the bankruptcy as ‘one of the nastiest corporate brawls in recent memory’, with creditors accusing the 2008 buyout equity firms of ‘unimaginably brazen looting’. 

Their emergence from the bankruptcy will see Caesars new corporate structure ‘focus its attention on developing empty plots it owns on the Las Vegas Strip’ as well as eyeing up ‘expansion in Canada, Brazil, and Japan, which recently legalized casino gambling’, according to CasinoNewsDaily.