SkyCity Entertainment Group has reached an agreement with New Zealand authorities to temporarily close the gambling area of its SkyCity Auckland casino for five consecutive days due to a failures to detect continuous play by a customer.
The casino closure would occur from a Monday to a Friday, with the dates still to be agreed on between SkyCity and New Zealand’s Secretary for Internal Affairs.
SkyCity is currently estimating that the five-day closure will negatively impact underlying Group EBITDA by ‘around NZ$5 million ($3.04 million)’.
The group has now revised its FY25 underlying Group EBITDA to between NZ$245 million ($148.93 million) and NZ$265 million ($161.1 million).
The closure agreement is still conditional on ‘the Gambling Commission consenting to the withdrawal of the Application by the Secretary’. This application related to a temporary suspension of SkyCity’s Auckland casino operator’s license for a period ‘in the range of 10 days’.
This application followed a compliant to the Department of Internal Affairs in February 2022 ‘by a former customer who gambled in the SkyCity Auckland casino from August 2017 to February 2021’.
In it, the Secretary alleged that SkyCity did not abide by requirements in its Host Responsibility Program (HRP).
SkyCity puts the incident down to ‘a design error in a technology system developed by SkyCity to monitor continuous play by carded customers (which has since been rectified)’.
The company did acknowledge that it ‘failed to exercise the level of vigilance required by the HRP to use staff observation independently and alongside the technology to identify those incidents of continuous play by the customer and then act accordingly’.
However, it noted that the complainant’s ‘problematic behavior was silent or hidden’.
Speaking of the event, SkyCity’s Chair Julian Cook noted: “reaching this agreement to close the SkyCity Auckland gambling area for five days resolves this matter. However, there is still considerable work required and underway to improve our risk systems, including our approach to mitigating financial crime and problem gambling“.
SkyCity has recently undergone a raft of management changes and improvements to its AML/CFT framework, after being investigated in New Zealand and Australia for non-compliance.
The group notes that it further intends to have ‘mandatory carded play across its New Zealand casinos by mid-2024, and at the SkyCity Adelaide casino by the end of 2024’.
