James Packer keen to see Crown projects take off, as regulators pore over casino empire

James Packer toured the Crown Sydney project with mum Ros and partner Kylie Lim, and was blown away by what he saw.

James Packer says he’s ‘genuinely happy’ to be back in Australia. Picture: Rohan Kelly

The luxurious villas on level 37 of Crown Towers Melbourne boasts stunning views over the city skyline.

On Wednesday evening this week, one played host for the first time in almost 12 months to Crown’s biggest shareholder as he made a surprise flying visit to Australia.

Unlike last year’s visit in February which was a secret affair, this week’s trip was deeply symbolic for James Packer.

For the first time he toured the $2.4bn Crown Sydney project with his mother Ros, partner Kylie Lim and newspaper and television reporters in tow and was blown away by what he saw rapidly taking shape.

He visited levels 48 and 49 of the project that will house the apartments for which he paid $60m in 2017 and revealed the hotel and restaurants at the site would open in December, ahead of the expected formal opening of the entire facility in February next year.

But more importantly the 52-year-old lunched with his mother at his family’s Bellevue Estate compound in Sydney’s east, his childhood home, its walls adorned with images of his life that once was and of his legendary father Kerry, who passed away on Boxing Day 2006.

The only missing piece from the lunch was his sister Gretel, who is in America and with whom he remains on good terms after they reconciled in 2018 following their bloody battle over dividing the family fortune.

James Packer with mother Ros at the $2.4bn Crown Sydney project site. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Two days earlier, the Packer family Foundation and Crown made headlines when they donated $4m to the bushfires crisis, adding to the $1m they had promised in November.

“After all that has happened, I genuinely have felt happy to come back to Australia,’’ Packer told me in his Crown Melbourne villa on Thursday, cigarette in hand and with the big screen television to his left tuned to the Fox News Channel from America.

“But I still feel as though my life is in neutral until Sydney is finished. The thing I am really looking forward to is Sydney opening.”

As was clear for the world to see this week — and it shocked some who saw him in the flesh for the first time in several years — Packer remains heavily medicated to deal with his psychological condition.

He trudged slowly, hands firmly by his side, around the Barangaroo site in Sydney and, on Thursday, the Queensbridge development site adjacent to Crown Melbourne.

When he speaks to you, his gaze doesn’t flinch, he looks you firmly in the eye the way he always has. He hasn’t lost his grasp of numbers, still reeling off share prices and balance sheets.

But now his words are slow, occasionally slurred. His sentences are mostly short.

He still feels, as he put it in my biography of his life, The Price of Fortune released in 2018, “dulled”.

James Packer’s partner Kylie Lim at the Barangaroo project site. Picture: Rohan Kelly

But aside from his weight, which continues to worry him, Packer is in a happier place. The television cameras and newspaper photographers this week captured him smiling.

“I’m OK,’’ he replies when I ask how he is feeling.

“I feel much better from where I was.”

His mother echoed the point on Wednesday as she toured Barangaroo.

She said her son was now “mentally in a much better space, which is wonderful”.

“It shattered him with the employees in jail in China. It shattered all of us,” she said in reference to the detention in China of Crown staff at the end of 2016 for alleged gambling crimes which drove her son over the edge.

James Packer’s most immediate focus is the inquiries into Crown by the NSW and Victorian gaming regulators and the Commonwealth Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission following media reports last year detailing sensational allegations of the casino group’s links to organised crime.

The NSW regulator, the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, will on January 21 commence public hearings to also consider whether Packer’s private company’s proposed $1.76bn sale of ­almost 20 per cent of its holding in Crown to Hong Kong billionaire Lawrence Ho’s Melco Group can proceed.

Packer would not comment on the inquiries other than to reiterate that they all had his full co-operation and that he would appear before the ILGA inquiry if requested.

The outcome of each, but most particularly the NSW investigation — which is being led by former NSW Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin — will determine where Crown goes next.

While the Crown Sydney project remains his passion, Packer is clear he didn’t come to Melbourne just to see friends.

James Packer with Crown Resorts director Andrew Demetriou in Melbourne. Picture: Aaron Francis

On Thursday, with Crown director and former Australian Football League boss Andrew Demetriou in tow, he toured the site of Crown’s One Queensbridge project, a proposed $2bn hotel and apartment tower that is currently on ice.

Last August Crown paid $80m to buy property developer Schiavello Group’s half stake in the project after the planning permit lapsed.

“Crown Melbourne is the heart of Crown and will always be so,” Packer says.

“Queensbridge is the future for the Crown Melbourne precinct and we are hoping to work with the Victorian government to seek fresh approval for what will be a great development for the city.”

In Melbourne Packer also dined with his good friend and Crown founder (and one of the executers of his father’s will, along with David Gonski) Lloyd Williams, met with Crown executive chairman John Alexander and director Harold Mitchell.

When Packer, Kylie Lim and Packer’s minder and best friend Ben Tilley jetted out of Melbourne on Thursday afternoon, they flew to Coffs Harbour for an unscheduled catch up with Russell Crowe at Nana Glen, the actor’s famed 320-hectare rural property outside the town.

Crowe famously didn’t appear at this week’s Golden Globe awards ceremony in Hollywood after choosing to remain at Nana Glen to defend it from bushfires.

Packer and Crowe jointly own the South Sydney rugby league team and have stayed in touch through the billionaire’s ups and downs of recent years. Packer financed Crowe’s directorial film debut in 2014, The Water Diviner.

Crowe invited his friend to Coffs Harbour after learning he was in the country again.

On Thursday evening Packer and his entourage flew back to Aspen, where he shares a home with his second wife Erica Packer. There he will remain for the coming weeks as the Bergin inquiry gets under way, hosting visits from numerous friends, including his first wife Jodhi Meares.

One of Packer’s closest confidantes, his long-time legal adviser Guy Jalland, is also expected to be there next week.

America remains important to Packer because Erica Packer resides in Los Angeles with their children Indigo, Jackson and Emmanuel. Packer saw them in Aspen at New Year.

Los Angeles is also home to the man Packer in his darkest moments once called “Dad”, movie legend Warren Beatty. They still keep in touch and recently lunched together at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s famed Polo Lounge, a favourite with generations of Hollywood stars.

They always sit at the corner table Beatty has called his own for more than 20 years.

In The Price of Fortune Beatty eschewed the parental label to describe his relationship with Packer. “That would not come to mind, a father figure,” he said. “I would say a friend.” While Packer will continue to split his time between his Aspen and Los Angeles homes, after this week Australia does not hold the fears it once did.

On Wednesday he told a television reporter that he wanted to spend more time in Sydney and “missed” the city he once said he was “scared of”.

For the first time since he stunned the world in March 2018 revealing he was battling mental health issues following the third nervous breakdown of his life, Packer was prepared to front television cameras again.

But now the billionaire must grit his teeth as regulators pore over his casino empire like never before and brace himself for the circus that will come if he is called to appear before the NSW public inquiry.

For the time being it will be a judge, lawyers and regulators that will determine how the next chapter will be written in his roller coaster life.

Damon Kitney is the author of The Price of Fortune being released in paperback by Harper Collins next month.