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The Victorian state gambling regulator has fined Crown Resorts’ Melbourne casino A$2m ($1.34m) over “system and control failures” that allowed hundreds of customers to evade its self-exclusion program.
The Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission (VGCCC) said 242 people who had self-excluded from the casino gambled at Crown Melbourne without management detecting them between October 2023 and May 2024.
The VGCCC detected the breaches through “ongoing monitoring of the casino’s operations”, it said in a statement on Tuesday (October 15), acknowledging that the breaches “were due to system and control failures rather than deliberate or egregious disregard by Crown of its regulatory obligations”.
Still, the A$2m fine is the first heavy penalty for Crown’s flagship casino for offences committed after it retained its licence earlier this year, though most of the self-exclusion breaches took place in the last six months of the company’s two-year probationary period.
The return of Crown’s licence, conditional on the ongoing implementation of a remediation “transformation plan”, followed the period of probation and a regulatory review, based in part on the report of a state government-appointed special manager.
The probationary period was triggered by a Royal Commission report into Crown Melbourne’s years of compliance failures in anti-money laundering protocols and duty of care to customers and staff, among numerous other breaches.
The VGCCC has also ordered Crown to appoint an independent expert to “assess the effectiveness of, and make recommendations for improving, the management of its self-exclusion program”, VGCCC chair Fran Thorn said on Tuesday.
Thorn added that Crown will be required to implement the expert’s recommendations.
“Those who self-exclude must be able to trust that gambling providers will take all reasonable steps to enforce their decision to avail themselves of this harm prevention initiative,” she said.
“By allowing people who have self-excluded to enter the casino and gamble, Crown has put them at risk of experiencing further gambling harm.
“However, it is also clear that a number of these self-excluded patrons are going to considerable lengths to avoid detection and break their exclusion requirements,” she added.
Crown has been fined around A$700m by state and federal authorities in the wake of media investigations and government-commissioned probes into the company’s misbehaviour, but its three casinos have since regained suitability in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia states.
Crown Resorts CEO Ciarán Carruthers, who led the company through its remediation phase upon his appointment by U.S. parent company Blackstone in 2022, announced his resignation in August, effective at the end of the year. His replacement is yet to be named.
The Australian Financial Review (AFR) daily reported on Monday that Blackstone injected almost A$500m into Crown Resorts’ coffers soon after financial transactions regulator AUSTRAC slammed the company with an A$450m fine in mid-2023.
AFR sources said the cash allowed operations to continue amid plummeting VIP revenue and the burden of remediation.
Even so, the company has closed one of two gaming floors at Crown Sydney and is cutting around 1,000 jobs across its three integrated resort facilities.
As for the VGCCC, today’s fine is the latest expression of its aggressive policy on gambling operator misconduct since the regulator was rebooted in January 2022.
The VGCCC on Monday said its prosecution of the pub and hotel owner Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group (ALH) over underage gambling led to a A$177,500 fine in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court and A$45,000 in costs against the company, totalling A$1.2m in fines for ALH in the last 14 months.
