Published: August 28, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/us/las-vegas-casino-settles-in-money-laundering-inquiry.html?_r=0

The Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the casino company controlled by Sheldon G. Adelson, a major Republican donor, has agreed to pay the federal government more than $47 million to resolve a money-laundering investigation that cast an unwanted glare on Mr. Adelson and his gambling empire during the presidential campaign last year.

 The agreement with the United States attorney’s office in Los Angeles, announced on Tuesday, means the Sands will not be prosecuted in the case. It ends one of two federal inquiries that came into public view last year when Mr. Adelson was becoming the biggest single political donor in history, donating tens of millions in support of several Republican presidential candidates.

The money-laundering investigation was reported last year by The Wall Street Journal. (A separate federal investigation examining whether the company violated federal laws against bribing foreign officials with its business activities in China is continuing.)

The money that the Sands agreed to pay the government represents the amount it received from Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese businessman with a pharmaceutical company in Mexico who was at the time the biggest all-cash gambler in the history of the Venetian, the Sands’ flagship casino resort in Las Vegas.

Mr. Ye Gon was indicted in 2007 on federal drug charges. Those charges were dismissed, but he has remained in federal custody pending an extradition request to Mexico, where prosecutors are seeking to pursue drug charges against him.

The agreement with the Sands lays out a list of failures by the company’s compliance personnel to vet Mr. Ye Gon and the source of his money after he transferred tens of millions to the Sands between 2005 and 2007 from multiple currency exchange houses in Mexico, according to federal prosecutors. Mr. Ye Gon even told casino employees that he preferred to wire the cash in smaller installments “because he did not want the government to know about these transfers,” the agreement said.

The Sands acknowledged in the agreement that while it believed it had been complying with federal laws, the company failed to “fully appreciate the suspicious nature of the information” coming from Mr. Ye Gon and should have done more to alert the authorities about him.

Federal prosecutors cited the Sands’ “voluntary and complete disclosure” of its activities involving Mr. Ye Gon, as well as the company’s “extensive” cooperation in the investigation, as the basis for the agreement not to prosecute.