After months of on-going discussions with various levels of the Spanish government and continued internal due diligence, Las Vegas Sands Corp. said today that a formal proposal to invest more than US$30 billion to develop a series of integrated resorts in Madrid, Spain will not be forthcoming from the company.
Las Vegas Sands Corp., Paradise, Nevada was looking at 12 integrated resorts with 3,000 guestrooms each, about half the size of the Las Vegas Strip in Spain for the European market. The timeline for the project’s completion was five to 10 years.
“We have reiterated time and again that our internal development process would dictate the outcome of a proposed development in Spain. That process has been extremely thorough and while the government and many others have worked diligently on this effort, we do not see a path in which the criteria needed to move forward with this large-scale development can be reached. As a result we will no longer be pursuing this opportunity,” said Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas Sands chairman and CEO. “Developing integrated resorts in Europe has been a vision of mine for years, but there is a time and place for everything and right now our focus is on encouraging Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, to dramatically enhance their tourism offering through the development of integrated resorts there.”