A United States appeals court has quashed a federal government attempted revival of its 2022 bid to make casino entrepreneur Steve Wynn (pictured in a file photo) register as a “foreign agent” due to his alleged lobbying on behalf of the Chinese government dating back to 2017.
Mr Wynn no longer had an obligation to register as a foreign agent because his alleged lobbying campaign ended in 2017, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found, according to the judgement issued on Friday.
The ruling upheld a lower court decision to dismiss the lawsuit. Mr Wynn had denied serving as a foreign agent.
Robert Luskin, an attorney for Mr Wynn, was cited by Reuters as saying in a statement: “This is a well-deserved end to a difficult ordeal.”
In May 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice had said it was seeking to compel Mr Wynn, founder and former chairman and chief executive of casino group Wynn Resorts Ltd, to register under the U.S.’ Foreign Agents Registration Act as an “agent of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and a senior official of the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security.”
Wynn Resorts is the parent of Macau casino operator Wynn Macau Ltd.
The Justice Department had alleged that “from at least June 2017 through at least August 2017,” Mr Wynn contacted the then-U.S. president, Donald Trump, and members of his administration, “to convey the PRC’s request to cancel the visa or otherwise remove from the United States a Chinese businessperson who left China in 2014, was later charged with corruption by the PRC and sought political asylum in the United States”.
In May 2022, a Chinese Foreign Ministry senior official said the U.S. move to label Mr Wynn as an “agent” of China, was “based on nothing but hearsay to deliberately hype up the ‘China-threat’ theory”.
Mr Wynn stepped down from the Wynn group in February 2018, after facing multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, which he denied.
In 2018 he also stepped away from a role as finance chair of the Republican National Committee in the U.S.
