DALLAS.- The NBA approved on Wednesday the sale of the majority stake of the Dallas Mavericks of Mark Cuban to the families that operate the casino company Sands of Las Vegas.
The agreement was approved just a month after the families of Miriam Adelson y Sivan y Patrick Dumont announced their intention to acquire the team. The purchase is located in a value range of 3.5 billion dollars.
Patrick DumontAdelson’s son-in-law and president and chief operating officer of the casino company Sands of Las Vegas, will serve as the governor of the Mavericks. Adelson is the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
Cuban is expected to remain in control of the team’s sports operations and there is no sign of him leaving Dallas.
Cuban had said he wanted a partnership with the Sands of Las Vegas with a long-term plan to build a stadium in downtown Dallas that would also include a hotel and casino.
Gambling is not legal in Texas, and efforts to legalize it have hit roadblocks. Despite this, Miriam Adelson has made no secret of its desire to bring casino gaming to the Lone Star State.
Last year he pumped more than $2 million into a political action committee, called Texas Sandswhich donated generously to state legislators and brought lobbyists to the state Capitol, controlled by the Republican Party. In addition, he donated a separate million dollars to the Republican governor Greg Abbott.
But the spending blitz failed to make much progress this year in the Texas Legislaturewhere resistance to casino legalization runs deep.
There is precedent in the NBA:
Texas already has a billionaire owner in the NBA, who is the operator of a casino, the owner of the Rockets de HoustonTilman Fertitta, who also supports the idea of bringing casinos to his home state, but has run into lawmakers dismissing the idea year after year.
The news of the sale of the Mavericks was announced last month, hours after the Sands of Las Vegas announced that Adelson was selling $2 billion of his stock to buy an unspecified professional sports team.
Source: AP
