LVS Las Vegas Sands Corp

By Kate O'Keeffe and Alexandra Berzon 

Las Vegas Sands Corp. has agreed to pay more than $75 million to settle a lawsuit by its former top Macau executive, whose allegations prompted federal bribery investigations into the company, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The confidential settlement, reached Tuesday, resolves all legal claims brought by Steve Jacobs against the company, its subsidiaries and its controlling shareholder, Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson , according to a statement from the company's Macau unit to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

The Jacobs settlement involves between $75 million and $100 million, according to the person familiar with the matter. The company's Hong Kong filing didn't specify a figure or elaborate on the terms of the deal.

The wrongful termination lawsuit brought by Sands' former Macau chief executive, in which he had alleged the company fired him for objecting to illegal demands from Mr. Adelson, had been set to go to trial in Nevada in September.

Mr. Jacobs's allegations had earlier prompted both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to investigate whether the company had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars U.S. companies from bribing officials of foreign governments.

In recent weeks, Sands has been resolving some of those matters. The company in April said it would pay $9 million to settle SEC allegations that its Chinese operations had poor accounting controls from 2006 through at least 2011. The settlement also requires the company to have an independent monitor for two years.

The SEC didn't accuse Sands of paying bribes, but said it had violated provisions of the law that require companies to maintain proper controls. For example, the SEC said the gambling company transferred more than $62 million to a consultant in China, often without supporting documents or appropriate authorization, and "despite knowledge by senior LVSC management that they could not account for significant funds previously transferred to the consultant."

Several weeks ago the company settled related civil allegations by Nevada gambling regulators, paying $2 million to the state.

It neither admitted nor denied allegations in either settlement.

The Justice Department investigation is still ongoing, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company says it is continuing to cooperate.

Casino executives at Sands and its rivals have long said that they wished Mr. Adelson would settle the Jacobs case because it brought unwanted scrutiny to the industry as a whole and the operations of casinos in Macau, the world's largest gambling hub. Mr. Adelson fought unsuccessfully for years to have the venue changed to Macau and to remove the Nevada judge assigned to the case.

The dispute became increasingly heated. At one point, in 2012, Mr. Jacobs said in a court filing that Mr. Adelson had approved a "prostitution strategy" at the company's Macau properties. Mr. Adelson responded with a defamation suit in Florida calling that allegation and others "shockingly outrageous and utterly false." The Florida court ruled that Mr. Adelson couldn't sue for defamation in this instance because the statements at issue had been made during litigation.

Mr. Adelson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that he wished he had settled Mr. Jacobs's suit early on but couldn't give in to what he believed were improper accusations.

"If we had known he was going to cause so much trouble, yeah, we would have given him what he wanted," Mr. Adelson said in an interview at that time.

Mr. Adelson sued Wall Street Journal reporter Kate O'Keeffe for libel in 2013. A spokeswoman for the Journal, which wasn't named in the suit, has said the newspaper would continue to vigorously defend Ms. O'Keeffe.

--Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.

Write to Alexandra Berzon at alexandra.berzon@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 01, 2016 01:51 ET (05:51 GMT)

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