Acting Commonwealth Casino Commission Chairman Ralph S. Demapan, right, speaks as Commissioners Martin Mendiola, left and Mario Taitano review their notes during a meeting on Tuesday.
THE Commonwealth Casino Commission’s executive director, Andrew Yeom, on Tuesday said he was unable to make a deal with Imperial Pacific International.
“I just don’t think that the settlement [discussion with IPI] can go through so I’m here to let you know that we don’t have a deal,” Yeom told acting Commission Chairman Ralph S. Demapan, Commissioners Mario Taitano, Ramon Dela Cruz and Martin Mendiola. The casino commission serves as a tribunal in the revocation hearing of IPI’s casino license.
“No more settlement talks will take place,” Yeom said, so “you do what you’ve got to do” with IPI’s exclusive license.
He said he and IPI explored many ways to come up with a “win-win” solution that is legally sufficient. But, he said, “the more we discussed, the more problems came out … surrounding IPI’s poor debt position, which kind of prohibits a lot of discussions, and even any type of stipulations or avenues that we can explore.”
Yeom said the challenges IPI is facing, which include federal court judgment creditors and receivership, brought their discussions “back to square one.”
Yeom said whatever payment IPI can make, the CNMI government would not be the first one to receive it, “so it will be moot for us to come up with a settlement.”
After an hour of closed-door deliberation, Demapan announced that the commission was “able to discuss legal issues and the members decided that we are going to go on recess until 10 a.m. [Wednesday, April 10]. The purpose of that is to ask the legal counsel for additional guidance.”
Not blameless
During the public comment section of the CCC meeting, former Development Plan Advisory Committee consultant James Chua told the commission that “you cannot just simply blame IPI for what has happened. The CNMI has a part in this.”
Created by the casino license agreement, DPAC was tasked to, among other things, “review and advise on the design for the integrated resorts and the initial gaming facility, assist in the development of the respective implementation schedules, and track implementation.”
Chua, who owns supermarkets on Saipan, said he was “involved in the IPI project even before it started. I was a consultant to the late Gov. Eloy S. Inos. I tried to convince him for two years to undertake casino gaming because … we only have beautiful beaches and great people. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of great beaches around the world.”
He said that in 2017, “we did an assessment and told the CNMI government the project would fail, and we told the gaming commission why. The … scope [of the project] was too big. The CNMI required IPI to do things that were impossible. And IPI, due to its own stupidity, agreed to an impossible undertaking. The project could not be financed as it was, and that is why it failed.”
But Chua said the casino license should not be revoked. “I think there is still potential to work together so long as the terms can lead to a successful project. We should not just throw this project away because something wrong has happened. All the wrongs that have happened, the CNMI allowed them to happen. The CNMI is also at fault for this failure. The CNMI can correct it. And I ask you not to revoke [the license]. Please find a way to resolve this for the benefit of the people as the law intended,” he added.
‘Leave the island’
Assistant Attorney General James Robert Kingman, for his part, noted that IPI Director Howyo Chi had said that they want to leave the island peacefully. “Take that for what it is,” Kingman told the commissioners. “They should leave this island. We don’t need their rebrand, we don’t need them to be another frozen food company. They don’t need to come back with another tactic,” he added.
Kingman said IPI has cast “a shadow … both physically and metaphorically over the entire recent history of this island and its people and of its laws.”
He told the commissioners that “it’s never too late to start doing the right thing.”
According to Kingman, IPI counsel Michael Chen had said that prior to Covid-19 IPI had been a good corporate partner.
Kingman disagreed. IPI, he said, lost “lawsuit after lawsuit. … [And] they showed exactly the pattern of deception that they … continue to employ.”
Rep. Marissa Flores said it is appropriate and necessary to revoke the IPI license. She noted that IPI owes millions of dollars to the CNMI government, and “there have been serious concerns raised regarding human lives, disregard to the people of my precinct, dishonesty and disrespect to the immigration system, among others. As a result, it is crucial for the casino commission to conduct itself finally with utmost seriousness and uphold its fiduciary responsibility.”
The commission said IPI owes the CNMI government over $62 million in annual exclusive casino license fees and over $17.62 million in regulatory fees plus fines and penalties, for a total of $79.63 million. The casino operator has not been able to meet its obligations to the government since it stopped its operations at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
Commonwealth Casino Commission Executive Director Andrew Yeom speaks to the commissioners.
Assistant Attorney General James Robert Kingman addresses the casino commission.
