Day by day, more details are starting to emerge for the new EuroVegas project in Spain. Madrid won this particular “el Classico” between the capital of Spain and the capital of Catalonia (Barcelona was the other contender).
Europe will soon have its own Vegas! The huge casino complex will take up as much space as 750 football pitches and it will be built in suburbs of Madrid .
Here are Your EuroVegas highlights (!)
Vegas-style: The huge gambling park just outside Madrid will draw heavily on the glitzy casino resorts of the Las Vegas Strip and the Cotai Strip in Macau. It should give a massive shot in the arm to the Madrid economy. Spain, like most European countires, is suffering from big debts and has been battling to get it’s defecit under control. Unemployment in Spain is over 25%, and more than half of young people are out of work.
American tycoon, Sheldon Adelson, with his company Las Vegas Sands Corp, has been investigating Europe for some time now. He already runs casino in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore. The company will put up 35% of the equity. It is not clear where the remaining 65 percent of the money will come from. Spanish banks are expected be among the investors.
The project is not without its controversy though. Las Vegas Sands wanted to build what some are calling a “state within a state” for gambling and will expect special tax breaks and their own interpretation of laws regulating smoking.
On Friday, multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands released a press release saying that it now had €9.8bn (£8.3bn) lined up to start cracking on Europe’s biggest casino and conference centre. The company has picked a site in a Madrid satellite town called Alcorcón.
Las Vegas Sands is putting in $3.6b and had banks are lending the rest.
The first bit of the project – with 4 “resorts” of 3,000 hotel rooms each (and casino games of course) will open in 2017.
Eventually, the 3 square mile site will be dominated by a 72-storey hotel skyscraper (or rascacielo)- the highest in the area. The entire project should be finished in under 20 years.
Just How Rich is Sheldon Adelson?
Well, he’s based in Las Vegas, and he is the 12th richest person in the United States, according to Forbes — with a net worth of over $20.5bn. He payed himself a $2.9bn cash bonus from Las Vegas Sands Corp in 2013. So, he’s got a few bob.
