Las Vegas sands has announced that it will not be bidding for the government’s planned 16 casinos, as it said it was only interested in the now scrapped supercasino in Manchester.

William Wiedner, Chief Operating Officer of Las Vegas Sands, said; “We spent a lot of time with the folks there (in Britain) trying to figure out how to do a larger style of gaming.  That didn’t work.  Mr Brown pretty well shut that down.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a statement earlier this month, shelved plans for a Las Vegas-style supercasino in Manchester after much speculation and criticism of the plan by the media.

Religious leaders and locals were also against the supercasino and campaigned against the plan. 

Gordon Brown is still likely to go-ahead with plans for 16 smaller casinos across the country.  William Wiedner has however said these casinos wouldn’t interest big US gambling companies.

“The home team won.  The operators there in the UK worked the system very well, so they ended up with what they wanted, what I would consider to be sub-optimal, lousy little casinos that kept them in the game and kept us out, said Wiedner.

US companies such as Las Vegas Sands, Harrah’s Entertainment and MGM Mirage have changed the face of Las Vegas over the past 10 years with a range of large and glitzy casino resorts and are looking to expand into the Asian gambling capital, Macau.

The big US companies feel that the newly proposed British casinos are too small for them and are better suited to British companies like Gala Coral and the Rank Group.

William Wiedner added, “And so they have the worst of all worlds - - now they have casinos that won’t drive visitors in from further away and they’ll just have larger places that take more of the money off the local people.

If we’d have known the game was stacked against us, we wouldn’t have wasted jet fuel going over there.”