At least to state officials, Resorts World NYC is trying to show that taxes are sexy.
Tax on gaming in Peru
The community advisory committee part of the downstate New York casino licensing process went on Monday morning, with Resorts World New York City as the most recent focus.

Resorts World's CAC gathered in what appeared like a real meeting room this week, with a lot of people there. This is different from last week's meetings. The committee itself has some of the most famous people in the field.

It has state Senator James Sanders, Assembly member Stacey Pheffer-Amato, and Queens borough President Donovan Richards instead of aides and lower-level officials. They all utilised their power to select themselves. On Monday, Pheffer-Amato was chosen to be chair.

If Resorts World gets one of the state's three new casino licenses, representatives from the corporation and its parent company, Genting, were there to explain the details of the property's $5.5 billion expansion plan. Last month, eight companies applied for the licenses. However, Bally's Corp's request doesn't seem likely to go through because they lost a rezoning campaign.

Kevin Jones, the chief strategy and legal officer for Genting Americas, was in charge of the Resorts World presentation. Jones said that the old Aqueduct Racecourse is by far the biggest piece of land that may be sold, at 73 acres. Its position just minutes from John F. Kennedy International Airport was also a big deal.

Jones said, "Aqueduct has a scale and connectivity that no other site in New York can match."

There was also a video from the rapper Nas, who is from Queens, that was already made. It's worth noting that Nas and musician Jay-Z, who is the main backer of the Caesars Times Square plan, had a very public and heated fight in the late 1990s. People said the two had made up, but now they are once again on opposite sides of a fight in New York.

Listen to me: all the taxes
If you were to sum up Resorts World's bid in one line, it would probably say something like, "Our current infrastructure lets us start paying even more taxes than we already do, faster than anyone else!"

The fact that Resorts World is already New York state's top direct and indirect taxpayer is by far the best thing about the enterprise. The video lottery terminal complex makes around $1 billion a year in gross gaming income, which means it has paid the state more than $4.5 billion in taxes since 2011.

Resorts World says that if it gets a full casino licence, it will make $2.2 billion a year by 2027. The casino has been talking about possible tax breaks of up to $1 billion a year for almost a year now. On Monday, company officials would not confirm those statistics, but they will release more accurate projections in the next few weeks.

The state is quite interested in tax revenue, and the bidders that make it past the CAC round will have to suggest their own tax rate. According to the American Gaming Association, New York racino machines are currently taxed at an effective rate of around 55%. In New Jersey, casinos pay 9.25%, and in Nevada, they pay 6.75%. The Empire State has the highest tax rate in the US for online sports betting (51%).

Need for speed
Another thing Resorts World likes to brag about is how quickly it can go to market. Genting made the property bigger than it needed to be when it got a VLT licence in 2010, hoping that it would grow in the future. In 2021, it opened a Hyatt with 400 rooms.

Executives claim that if they get a licence, the facility will just fill all of its available space with 4,000 slots and 250 tables, which will let it start operating by July 2026. That's a whole year before the next fastest speed to market, which is MGM Empire City, a neighbouring racino that is proposing mid-2027.

The rest of the expansion facilities would be completed slowly over the next five years after the initial phase. The completed building would have 6,000 slots and 800 tables by 2030. If this happens, it would be the biggest casino in the US.

Jones told the committee, "No other proposal can come close to our speed to market."

A global view
Genting is one of the most worldwide gaming businesses trying to get the licenses. It runs resorts across the US, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Robert DeSalvio, who runs Genting's New York operations, dubbed the NYC area the "epicentre of finance, tourism, and culture." He stated it is the biggest metro area for gaming that hasn't been used yet and has a lot of rich people living there.

DeSalvio said that the New York process is competitive, but Genting has won a number of highly sought-after bids in the past, including one of just two Singapore licenses.

He stated, "I've seen world-class gaming markets in places like Las Vegas, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia during my career." "But I've never seen an opportunity like the one we have right here at Resorts World."

What goes on in Vegas...
The presentation on Monday was flashy, long, and well-prepared. Resorts World seems to be the clear leader in the bidding competition since it has a lot of tax income, a good relationship with the state, and can get things to market quickly. But a bad part of its business has made news 2,500 miles to the west.

Resorts World Las Vegas has been in the news for years because of an anti-money laundering scandal involving several illegal bookies who were allowed to visit the resort even though the casino knew where they got their money and what they were doing. Matt Bowyer, the bookie who took bets from Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, is one of them. RWLV even hired Nicole, Bowyer's wife, to be her husband's personal host.

In late March, the casino was fined $10.5 million for past AML failures. This was the second-largest fine ever given by Nevada regulators. Scott Sibella, the former president of RWLV who was at the core of the affair, also lost his gaming licence. Alex Dixon was hired as president in January, but by May he had been secretly sacked and demoted.

Last month, Brian O'Dwyer, head of the New York State Gaming Commission, claimed that the current round of the licensing process began with a blank slate. O'Dwyer told the New York Post last September that the claims against Resorts World were "of particular concern" to him.

O'Dwyer stated at the time, "These allegations in the complaint are especially troubling because they claim that there was a culture of non-compliance in which information about illegal or suspicious activity was either ignored or worse, ignored completely to make money."