Case Study
seeing the 1979 made-for-TV film Murphy’s Stroke based on the real life Gay Future affair, where an Irish betting syndicate substituted one horse for another and would have netted about €3m in today’s money if the suspicious betting patterns had not been spotted. In a moment worthy of Peter Cooke, the judge at the eventual trial of the ringleaders responded to the guilty verdict of the jury by saying it would be “absurd to regard Murphy as a fraudulent man” and ordered a fine of a thousand pounds. History does not record if the judge subsequently asked if he had any tips for The National or the name of a good guest house near Prestbury Park.
I tell these stories to show that I´ve no moral or ideological objection to betting or gambling. I am however, very much against the proposed “Eurovegas” development which the cities of Madrid and Barcelona are currently competing for. The Las Vegas Sands Corporation wants to build a replica of a strip in Las Vegas, Nevada. The published numbers are 12 resorts with 36,000 rooms,
six casinos, nine theatres
and three golf courses. To build this thing will require an investment of up to €18.8 billion through to 2022 but will employ 164,000 people directly
and 97,000 indirectly. In return US gambling king Sheldon Adelson wants to be granted exemptions from current laws on smoking, immigration, minors, prostitution, money laundering and town planning. You might as well call it what it is “a fiscal and legislative island” such are Adelson’s considerable demands for autonomy.
Most readers will already be aware of
the unemployment situation in
Spain. Overall the number is well over 20% and among the youth, the figure is 1 of every 2 people out of work. Employers are fond of saying that there is not a jobs shortage, but a skills shortage. So to take these people off
the unemployment line
requires the availability of low skilled work such as in construction and the service industries. You can see why politicians under pressure wanting to do something, anything, would find this project appealing. Similarly, the Port Vell Marina project in Barcelona with the traditional fishermen’s neighbourhood of La Barceloneta, one of the few remaining barrios to have retained its character, is earmarked to become the Med’s prime home for super yachts. This part of Barcelona survived the gentrification of other parts of the old town that came with the
1992 Olympics, but modernisation gets what modernisation wants and losing a few cheap seafood restaurants would surely be a small price to pay for a visit from Roman Abramovich´s super yacht/submarine, the argument goes.
It is something of a joke among entrepreneurs in Madrid to hear of a politician who wants to build Europe´s Silicon Valley (particularly as the cluster model on which Silicon Valley is based is seen by many to be insular, arrogant and in decline). Similarly in decline is Las Vegas, whose best days are seen to be behind it, most notably by the casinos operators themselves. They now have eyes only for Macau, the only Chinese territory where it is legal to gamble in a casino and where the quantity of money in play is five times that of Las Vegas. The state of Nevada has the highest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the USA and most of the profits come from coins fed into slot machines (“Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots” as Robert de Niro put it in the film Casino) rather than anything more sophisticated. The slump in Vegas is so pronounced that a group of entrepreneurs have got together “to transform Downtown Las Vegas into
17 entrepreneurcountry
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