Crown just keeps on getting more bizarre

Crown Resorts executive chairman Helen Coonan. Photographer: Adam Yip

THE Crown casino group is operating in what is undoubtedly the most bizarre collection of circumstances I would suggest that any publicly listed company in Australia has ever done.

First off and importantly, Crown is a “casino group”.

It calls itself Crown Resorts, but if you took away the casinos, the gaming, the high, low and middling rollers, do you think people would flock to Burswood and Southbank as great “resort destinations”?

And even if they did whether that Crown Resorts would have a viable business – even in a hoped-for post-Covid world?

There certainly wouldn’t be two-and-a-half groups offering to pay big – as in multi-billion – bucks for such a Crown.

The world’s biggest investment group Blackstone isn’t offering more than $8bn to buy three hotels, even when one of them is the six-star beauty, or not, at Barangaroo.

Australia’s other casino group Star is bidding something similar with the precise aim of doublings its casino business and wrapping up a nationwide monopoly – ex a few unimportant tiddlers.

So, it’s all and only about Crown’s casinos.

Yet Crown has just come out of one all-but Royal Commission – NSW’s Bergin Inquiry – which put a big question mark over its right to run a casino at the $2bn “resort” it’s built on the harbour.

Crown Resorts executive chairman Helen Coonan. Photographer: Adam Yip

To go straight into, without passing Go and certainly not collecting $200 – not just one but two Royal Commissions, in Victoria and WA, each designed to see whether it’s fit to continue to run its existing casinos.

The Crown board has to try to run an auction – the ‘half’ in my ‘two-and-a-half’ bidders is investor main-chancer Oaktree which hasn’t bid for Crown but wants to finance Crown into buying out James Packer – while simultaneously trying to deal with those two RCs and a seemingly not-stop ‘delivery’ of dirty linen that could at least threaten to lose the gaming licences.

Now maybe it’s inconceivable that one – or both could actually be taken away; although I don’t quite see why not: what’s the point of having the rules and the penalty, if it’s never to be used?

But even so, there’s every prospect – certainty? – of some upfront and continuing financial and business pain to come out of these two RCs as there has already emerged from Bergin.

Oh, did I mention Packer. Throw him into the bizarre mix: an – on-paper – controlling shareholder who has specifically committed to not controlling Crown.

But he’s still there as a brooding presence, and his shares will deliver control – and victory – if we ever get to a situation where an acquisition can be both triggered and completed.

So we’ve got a board that’s trying to juggle all this, which itself is having to go through a total re-making from the Packer years, while it’s also trying to completely remake its executive team.

Helen Coonan emerged from the Bergin debris as the linchpin of this remaking. But she’s 73 years-old, has been a director of Crown for ten years - all the way through the turbulent 2010s – and clearly can’t be a long-term proposition if Crown were to emerge ‘untaken over’. With apologies to Winston Churchill, she clearly did become chairman with the sole task of selling Crown – with emphasis - casino group to someone. There sure ain’t anything else to sell.

Now return to that reality. The big dollars in Crown’s ‘value’ are the Chinese high-rollers. When are they coming back? It’s not just Covid; it’s also the ‘China thing’.

The big local dollars are almost all in Melbourne; that adds another weird: the Victoria of Chairman Dan penchant for lockdowns.

Maybe we will wake up some time in – late-2021? 2022? – and the pieces will all have fallen into place and Packer having sailed off into the sunset. But right now it’s bizarro centrale.