John Alexander was a close friend of the billionaire James Packer, and his right-hand man on the Crown Resorts board, but he was unable to tell the New South Wales casino inquiry on Thursday why Packer left the board.
Packer stepped down as chairman in August 2015 and briefly became a director before leaving altogether by the end of that year. He returned briefly in 2017 as a director when Alexander took over as executive chairman.
Under questioning, Alexander on Thursday said he “could not recall” if he had asked Packer why he was leaving the board of the company in which he held 46% of the shares.
“So you had no idea why a director had gone?” the commissioner heading the inquiry, Patricia Bergin SC, asked.
“I think that he wanted to concentrate on restructuring his interests,” Alexander replied.
Bergin then asked: “You were a close personal friend and he didn’t tell you?” To which Alexander said: “I genuinely can’t recall.”
Crown issued a statement in December 2015 saying Packer would take up a new role at the company but Alexander said he could not recall whether that actually happened.
“I think it was something like president of international strategy or something like that. The objective was to drive more opportunities for the company globally,” he said.
Alexander is the latest director of Crown to give evidence to the NSW inquiry into whether Crown remains suitable to hold a licence to operate a high roller casino in NSW.
He is a focus of attention because he was deputy chairman and then executive chairman of Crown during the crucial period that is now under scrutiny by the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority. He stepped down as chairman just before the inquiry started but remains on the board.
He was also Packer’s close confidante and was the key executive overseeing Packer’s casino interests. Although Alexander is not a director of Packer’s private company, Consolidated Press Holdings, he is a longtime employee of CPH, albeit with no title and no specific duties, as he told the inquiry on Thursday.
Packer is due to give evidence by video link on Tuesday.
The inquiry follows allegations in the Nine media that Crown turned a blind eye to money laundering at the Melbourne Crown casino and to criminal links within junkets that Crown did business with.
Junkets are companies that bring high-roller gamblers to casinos. They often share in the profits from gambling and in some cases run their own high-roller rooms within the casinos.
The inquiry has heard evidence that Crown did business with the Suncity junket controlled by Alvin Chau – a man with alleged links to the 14K triad.
Alexander has faced detailed questions about what he knew of Crown’s arrangements with its China staff who were arrested en masse and jailed by Chinese authorities in October 2016 for breaching China’s anti-gambling laws.
Chinese law prohibited people from soliciting Chinese citizens to travel overseas to gamble.
Alexander was asked whether he had seen media articles from 2015 about a Chinese crackdown on foreign casinos soliciting gamblers, which had been sent to his office as part of media monitoring. Alexander said he did not recall seeing them.
He was told that executives in charge of Crown’s VIP program had admitted they were aware of China’s crackdown and that one board member, Michael Johnston, knew about it but that members of the board’s risk management committee were not made aware of the crackdown.
Asked why it had not been drawn to the board’s attention or that of the risk management committee, Alexander said: “It’s clearly a failure of information flow upwards.”
He also agreed that management-sanctioned arrangements for staff to work from home and instructions that they should tell Chinese authorities they were only visiting China and were working overseas were inconsistent with Crown’s stated policy of acting ethically and with integrity.
But he said as a board member he was “unaware” of these instructions to China-based staff. Alexander said he had only read the legal advice Crown had received after the arrests.
“We were assured we were operating legally in China,” he said.
Asked who had made these assurances, Alexander said: “In a broad sense, management.” He said he believed it was Rowan Craigie, the former managing director. Alexander will continue giving evidence on Friday.
