One of Europe’s oldest and largest casinos, the Casino di Campione, is threatened with bankruptcy, having lately been the subject of corruption accusations, police investigations into embezzlement, and having run up some pretty enormous debts to the Swiss banks.
The Casino di Campione now has liabilities amounting to around $67 million; its records from 2016 showed total assets of around $21 million against a debt to the Swiss banks of around $40 million equivalent.
The casino is owned by the local Italian municipality of Campione d’Italia in Lombardy. It is actually an exclave, meaning it is surrounded by the Swiss canton of Ticino and lies less than a kilometre from the rest of Italy.
The 2,000 residents collect an agreed amount from the casino every year, and it must balance the budget of the municipality by law. It has been losing money at a rate of knots since 2012, and prosecutors in the Como province have accused the operators of financial impropriety. They have further suggested that it is not capable of creating profits, and therefore not fit for the purpose, locally, for which it was created. The casino could access further bank loans, but prosecutors seem to want to see it forced into bankruptcy. As the Public Prosecutor’s Office noted, “a capital increase, carried out against a company in serious insolvency, would only serve to lengthen the irreversible crisis, and increase its debt exposure to the municipality”.
Mayor Roberto Salmoiraghi has called for cuts of staff salaries of 20% in an effort to save the casino from bankruptcy, and there had been a plan in place to open a separate venue called Dragon Casino, exclusively for high stakes gambling by Chinese clients. It is not yet clear how this latter plan may be affected by the forced bankruptcy.
