Nevada to investigate the attorney general

State legislators will launch an official inquiry to determine if Nevada’s attorney general had benefited Las Vegas Sands Corporation.

US.- Nevada legislators will launch an official inquiry to decide on whether the attorney general Adam Laxalt tried to benefit Las Vegas Sands Corporation’s CEO, Sheldon Adelson. The alleged lobbying happened when he unexpectedly requested a meeting with the Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman A.G. Burnett in March 2016, according to Democrat lawmakers.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Burnett secretly recorded the conversation that took place in a coffee shop in Reno, where Laxalt took him after travelling suddenly to meet. Burnett revealed in a statement in February that the attorney general asked him to intervene in an ongoing lawsuit in favour of Adelson.

The report quotes Laxalt saying: “Don’t go soft on me. I think it is a challenging request because it will look like [Las Vegas Sands Corporation] is getting a special thing and so I wouldn’t do anything that jeopardizes me either.” Burnett refused to intervene and said that “the optics would be horrendous.” Then, he took the recording to federal law enforcement officials.

Laxalt reportedly responded: “I’m not trying to pitch a side or anything on it” and, in the end, neither one of them invervened in the Las Vegas Sands litigation that ended with a loss of tens of millions of dollars for the operator.

Despite the negative outcome for Adelson’s company, AP, Nevada lawmakers are eager to get answers about the conversation and might even impeach Laxalt. In order to do so, they need a simple majority in the Nevada Assembly and two-thirds in the State’s Senate.

Maggie Carlton, a Democrat member of the Assembly said to AP: “The legislature has an oversight responsibility to investigate and root out anything that undermines the integrity of the gaming industry; the core of Nevada’s economy.”