Churchill Downs Inc. announced yesterday that it testament spend nearly $2.5 one thousand million to win to the highest degree of Peninsula Pacific Entertainment’s (P2E) assets. One immunity from the takeover is P2E’s shuttered DiamondJacks Casino in Bossier City, Louisiana.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, P2E is a gaming operator with properties inward Iowa, Virginia, New York, and Louisiana. The company’s Pelican State holding has sat closed in(p) since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020.
Peninsula Pacific utmost twelvemonth sought-after(a) to relocate its Pelican State gaming permission from Bossier City to Slidell, N of New Orleans. But voters inward St. Tammany Parish — rest home to Slidell — rejected lifting the county’s longstanding ban on commercial-grade gaming.
The election outcome to P2E out of use(p) its proposed $325 one thousand thousand Camellia Bay Resort inwards Slidell from moving forward. It also set the company’s state-issued gaming privileges into legal limbo.
Potential Buyer Identified
Louisiana gaming law requires that issued gambling casino licenses follow active, signification a companion cannot simply bear on to a let without conducting gaming operations. State gaming regulators allowed P2E to set aside its gaming business inward Bossier City as it sought-after(a) to relocate to Slidell.
Following the local election inward December against Camellia Bay, the LA Gaming Control Board informed P2E that it had 60 years to reopen DiamondJacks or sell the license. Otherwise, the unshakable risked forfeiture of the concession.
Sixty days get long passed. The plank has been willing to work with P2E, as it decides its next steps for the dated and deteriorating riverboat. Gaming regulators would favour Peninsula Pacific sell the gambling casino and associated certify instead of forfeiture, as reissuing the licence would require a summons physical process that could read several years.
P2E informed the say this week that it’s inward negotiations to sell DiamondJacks to an entity called Foundation Gaming Group. The Mississippi-based regional gaming keep company owns and operates ii gambling casino resorts in Mississippi River — the Fitz Casino and Hotel and WaterView Casino & Hotel.
Buyer Experienced in Turnarounds
During its encounter last-place week, LA gaming officials verbalised escalating concerns regarding the DiamondJacks Casino eyesore in Bossier City. The gambling casino is located just cancelled I-20 and has its own exit.
Ronnie Johns, chair of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board, says P2E potentially marketing the riverboat to Foundation Gaming is promising. “They make a very solid state report inwards Mississippi,” Johns told KSLA of Foundation.
Johns explained that Foundation’s casinos inward its rest home say were in a bad way(p) properties when the companion acquired them.
[Foundation] turned them into viable, real profitable operations, according to the MS regulators who I’ve spoken with,” Johns added.
Bringing DiamondJacks plump for into performance testament require considerable investment. After announcing its lasting closure inward 2020, P2E sold off much of the cassino resort’s upcountry furnishings and commercial kitchen equipment.
The riverboat has also been a favourite hangout for vandals. Local constabulary documented to a greater extent than 120 trips to the gambling casino in 2020 — or rough one time every troika days.