Mass. gaming investigators find Wynn Resorts' 2014 donation was legal
Investigators for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission determined that Wynn Resorts violated no law in 2014 when the company made a $2 million donation to the Republican Governors Association, which subsequently contributed to the campaign of Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, then the Republican candidate for the state's top office.
Wynn Resorts made the donation two weeks after the commission awarded Wynn the sole Boston-area gaming license. Wynn Resorts and Mohegan Sun had vied for the license.
The commission is reviewing its awarding of the license in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct by Steve Wynn, former chairman and chief executive officer of Wynn Resorts. Wynn has resigned from the company, as well as from the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee's Finance Committee. He has denied the allegations.
At a commission meeting Thursday in Boston, Loretta Lillios, chief enforcement counsel for the commission’s Investigations and Enforcement Bureau, reported that Wynn Resorts was no longer an applicant for a gaming license at the time it made the $2 million donation. At that point, she said, the company already had been awarded the license and no longer was subject to the commission’s jurisdiction.
Coverage of the meeting was streamed live on the commission's website.
Having been awarded the license, Wynn Resort had become a gaming “licensee,” Lillios said, and was at that point subject to Massachusetts campaign finance laws, which are enforced by the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
Investigators concluded that the contribution was legal because the Republican Governors Association is not a state political committee subject to Massachusetts law.
Lillios said her office revisited the Wynn Resorts donation at the request of three Democratic candidates seeking to run for governor against Baker this year.
She told the commission that the review of the Wynn Resorts license is “a priority” and that her office does not intend to discuss the investigation publicly until it is complete.
Mohegan Sun has been contesting the awarding of the Boston-area license to Wynn Resorts since shortly after the commission’s 3-1 vote in favor of Wynn Resorts’ plan to build in the city of Everett. Mohegan Sun, which had proposed a project in Revere adjacent to Suffolk Downs, contends in a lawsuit that the commission acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” in awarding Wynn Resorts the license.
The Everett project, dubbed Wynn Boston Harbor, has been scheduled for completion in 2019.
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