Final decision on site for EuroVegas to be announced in September

The Las Vegas Sands Corporation will make a final decision in early September on where it will build EuroVegas, the mega casino and hotel convention center project, a top company official said on Monday.

Mike Leven, Las Vegas Sands’ director general, said that his company still had no favorite between the candidate cities. “This isn’t a soccer match between Madrid and Barcelona,” Levin said at a news conference in the Catalan capital, where the other company officials were holding more meetings with regional and city authorities.

The party will travel to Madrid on Tuesday to continue discussions with regional premier Esperanza Aguirre and Mayor Ana Botella.

Levin said that both host city candidates are still in with the same chance of seeing EuroVegas built on their outskirts.

Las Vegas Corporation officials have pushed back the date for the announcement of a winner on several occasions since the company chairman, Sheldon Adelson, announced last year his plans to construct the 27-billion-euro mega site in Spain.

Slated to create an estimated 260,000 jobs while it is being built in three phases over 10 years, EuroVegas will be made up of 12 resorts and six casinos, with a total of 18,000 slot machines.

But not everyone is happy about the project. As the delegation arrived in Barcelona they were met by a group of protestors from the Catalan green party ICV, who held up signs on the side of a highway that read in English: “Adelson go home.”

Cayo Lara, the national coordinator for the United Left (IU) coalition, said that Spain didn’t need “a factory of compulsive gamblers.” He said that EuroVegas, or for that matter all types of casinos, are “not productive economies for any country.”

“These casinos are designed so that people can win money from others, ruining many families and turning a lot of people into compulsive gamblers,” he said.

Catalan economy commissioner Andreu Mas-Colell said that the meeting government officials held with the people from the Las Vegas Sands “was just another one like many we have held in the past.”