EuroVegas Pie-In-The-Sky, Goodbye!

Good news that you won't find making the PR circuit this month: the EuroVegas gambling complex proposed outside Madrid by Las Vegas Sands' owner Sheldon G. Adelsohn will not be built.

Goodbye to a 17 billion euro investment, 12 hotels with 36,000 rooms, six casinos, golf courses, shopping malls, a convention center, bars and restaurants. And goodbye, supposedly, to some 250,000 new jobs.

The project was cancelled because the Spanish government didn't accept the promoter's latest demands, but these were so far-fetched that they look more like a lame exit strategy on the part of Adelsohn (they included reducing taxes on gambling earnings to 1%).

Analysts suggest that the real reason Adelsohn pulled the plug is the failure of banks to line up financing for the project. Too much pie-in-the-sky.

So what's to celebrate? It's not like Spanish politicians didn't rush in to try to meet Adelsohn's demands for changes in labor laws, smoking restrictions, zoning and other legal niceties.

Didn't they learn anything from the past 15 years of debauched investments in failed theme parks, airports and cities of this and that (Culture, Arts and Sciences, Cine, Justice, etc. etc.)? No, it's the same old formula. But for once the banks didn't go along (the banks that went along with the first 15 years of boondoggling are no longer in the business).

How could they believe that EuroVegas, with its cheap jobs and mafia taint, could be a solution to anything?

Despite it all, though, I'm celebrating.

Goodbye, EuroVegas!
Bon Voyage!!!

Photo: Rendering of EuroVegas
From The Guardian. Feb. 8, 2013

Stories on the cancellation: 
Eurovegas not coming to Madrid after company demands rejected
El País, Dec. 13, 2013
(in English)

José Marcos
EuroVegas planta a Madrid por Asia
El País, Dec, 13, 2013

Petition Against EuroVegas. And Valdevaqueros!

Sign a petition for government disclosure of negotiations over EuroVegas organized by change.org.
Thanks, José Selgas.

(See my blog entry of April 29, The EuroVegas Threat).

José also sends this link for a petition to save the Valdevaqueros beach in Tarifa (above), threatened with a macro-development, a project that was just approved by the local government.

For details, here's the El Pais story on the vote from May 31, 2012.

Photo of Valdevaqueros Beach from:
Plataforma Ciudadana Por la preservación de Los Lances y Palmones

The EuroVegas Threat

Playboy Club Sands Macao, owned by Sheldon Adelson

For those following the negotiations for the building of EuroVegas, a  multi-casino-and-hotel complex in Madrid or Barcelona, the April 9th issue of The New Yorker has a profile of Sheldon Adelson, the casino operator who hatched the deal. The article portrays the emergence of Macao as the world's biggest gambling capital, feeding off the booming Chinese economy and dethroning Las Vegas, which has been hard-hit by the ongoing American economic slump.

This weekend, Madrid's Club de Dedates Urbanos (Urban Debates Club) put the propsoal on the table for public discussion. A three-hour video of the first day is available on their web page here.

I won't go into all the details of the negotiations, which have been widely covered in the press. Articles on the subject are collected on a special page at El País: EuroVegas.

I find it hard to believe that politicians are taking this seriously, and  everyone else is taking it so calmly. But I also find it hard to believe that the proposal will actually get anywhere. It stinks like a sure-fire failure -- or an outright ripoff of public funds with the collusion of gullible public authorities, always ready to lower their trousers when a wad of bills gets waved under their noses.

Manuel Vicente offered a biting critique of the spectacle a couple of weeks ago in his Sunday column in El País on April 15th:

"…the forces of greed are once again prepared to introduce another damaging virus into this country. It's called Eurovegas, by Sheldon Adelson, a dude who takes Spaniards for idiots. In the middle of the economic crisis this macaroni promises us casinos, roulette wheels, whores, gangsters and skyscrapers in middle of the wasteland, as long as politicians, in exchange for hypothetical jobs, are prepared to lower their pants. This surfer dude carries a plague, similar to that of the red palm weevil, and he demands the same advantages enjoyed by this bug: nothing about controls, so he can nest at his ease, like a boil on the neck of future speculators, who, once they've filled their sacks,  will leave this desert of brick to the mercy of the foxes and lizards." (Translation by DC)

Added June 5, 2012 
Sign a petition for government disclosure of negotiations over EuroVegas organized by Change.org. Thanks, José Selgas.