Marina Bay Singapore – casino flying, conventions teething

Q1: How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A1: Three. One to climb the ladder. One to shake it. And one to sue the ladder company.

Q2. What do you call a smiling, sober, courteous person at a bar association convention?

A2. The caterer.

Q3. How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?

A3. His lips are moving.

Q4. If you drop a snake and a lawyer off the Marina Bay Sands Sky Park, which one hits the ground first?

A4. Who cares?

I could go on and on forever.  But I’ll finish with just one last Q & A that is at the heart of the below story.

Q. If you open a multi-billion dollar convention centre, who don’t you want as your first-run customers?

A. Lawyers

You see the folk at Marina Bay didn’t think there was any truth behind the million-and-one lawyer jokes, and booked as their first convention customers the Inter-Pacific Bar Association.  The result?…

The IPBA are refusing to pay an outstanding $212,000 conference bill and have responded to a casino lawsuit to recover the cash with a counter suit of their own. The counter suit was  filed with the Singapore High Court on June 8 and is seeking damages for misrepresentation and breach of agreement in connection with their May 2-5 conference.

According to the IPBA, the conference was an unmitigated disaster.  Among the long list of mishaps that delegates were subjected to were a power failure during the keynote address by the New South Wales Chief Justice, a leaking hotel atrium roof complete with strategically placed buckets to collect dripping water, unfinished rooms that saw some guests locked in due to faulty latchkeys and misplaced luggage.

IBPA claim the resort then threatened to jeopardize and withhold services when they expressed reluctance to make payment because of the problems.  They did hand over cheques in the face of what they described as “maximum duress, fear and force” from Marina Bay staff but subsequently stopped two of those cheques.

Las Vegas Sands COO Michael Leven summed up the situation quite well in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV, saying that,

“Some of the problems were normal opening difficulties that any property has, particularly one of that size…But we did have a convention of lawyers to start out with, so we knew we were going to have some kind of conversation.”

I’m tipping the conversation will continue for some time yet.

Better news in the casino

Meanwhile, things seem to be shaping up a little more positively on the casino side of things.  Leven told Businessweek that 550,000 patrons had visited the casino in the first month of operation, and while no revenue figures were provided he did intimate that the numbers were stacking up well.

“If we continue at this rate, with no improvement for the rest of the year in the casino win, and just add the improvement in the hotel, we’ll exceed the analysts’ expectations.”

So, steady as she goes in the casino and no more legal conventions (or group lawyer hotel bookings) and the $5.5 billion dollar Marina Bay Sands looks like it will do just fine.

Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson’s take on the lawsuits…

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