Paper’s attorney: Adelson doesn’t own the R-J

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Steve Marcus

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate, and his wife, Miriam, take part in a groundbreaking ceremony for the MSG Sphere in September 2019. Tuesday, an attorney for the Las Vegas Review-Journal told a Clark County judge that Adelson was not the newspaper’s owner despite numerous reports in the R-J to the contrary.

Tue, Nov 12, 2019 (10 p.m.)

In direct contradiction to reports published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and elsewhere, a lawyer for the newspaper disputed Tuesday that billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson owned the R-J.

During a status-check hearing over matters pertaining to a lawsuit involving the Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun, R-J attorney Randall Jones said any representation of Adelson as owner of the newspaper was incorrect.

"We haven't identified who the owners are of the R-J," Jones said. "It is my general understanding that Mr. Adelson is not an owner of the R-J."

If that's the case, the R-J has misled its readers. The newspaper has published a number of stories, editorials and other items in which it identified Adelson and his family as the R-J's owners.

Jones made the comments before Clark County District Judge Timothy Williams while arguing that Adelson and his son-in-law, Las Vegas Sands CFO Patrick Dumont, should be excluded from a request by Sun lawyers to provide electronic documents they say are relevant to the litigation.

Sun lawyers contend the Review-Journal has not turned over electronic documents as directed by the court.

The Sun attorneys have said they believed Adelson and Dumont were involved in a decision to redesign the look of the Review-Journal's print product — a move that limited the prominence of the front-page "Sun box" in which the Sun promotes its daily content. The Sun contends the redesign was a breach of a joint operating agreement between the Review-Journal and the Sun.

The JOA structure was created under the Newspaper Preservation Act, approved by Congress in the 1970s. That legislation provides limited antitrust protection for newspapers to combine business functions while remaining editorially independent.

The R-J is owned by News+Media Capital Group LLC, which is controlled by the Adelsons. The Sun is owned by Brian Greenspun.

Jones claimed that "neither Mr. Adelson nor Mr. Dumont attended any meetings related to the Sun box redesign," adding that he didn't consider the pair to be employees of the Review-Journal.

"They are third parties," Jones said. "There's another entity, News+Media, so, technically, I think there would have to be a subpoena to that entity. I'm happy to have a meeting to look at this and see what evidence they have to show that Mr. Adelson or Mr. Dumont are implicated in the redesign of the Sun box."

Sun attorney Leif Reid said the claim that Adelson had nothing to do with the R-J was "refuted every day in the Review-Journal itself."

"The Review-Journal puts a disclosure at the bottom of every article that covers the Sands," he said. "Let's get real about that — nobody disputes that Mr. Adelson is the owner of the Review-Journal."

The R-J indeed publishes such a disclosure on a regular basis. Here's an example from a recent story about the MSG Sphere, the 18,000-seat entertainment venue under construction near The Venetian. "The Review-Journal is owned by the family of Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson."

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The Jan. 11, 2016, Review-Journal included a note about the publication's owner, Sheldon Adelson.

In addition, the R-J has published several mentions of Adelson and his family being its owners. Among them:

• From an editorial published Dec. 21, 2015: "Sheldon Adelson, billionaire casino magnate and Republican Party mega donor, is the new owner of Nevada's largest newspaper. The Las Vegas Review-Journal's editorial page can become his family's personal soap box, if that's what they want."

• An information box published in the "About the Owners," states: 'The Las Vegas Review-Journal is owned by the family of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson through their controlling interest in News + Media Capital Group LLC. ... Their various interests will be disclosed when relevant in stories throughout the Review-Journal, reviewjournal.com and the newspaper's mobile applications."

• From a story published Dec. 17, 2015: The son-in-law of billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson arranged the $140 million purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Adelson's behalf, sources confirmed Wednesday. Patrick Dumont, who is listed on the website of Las Vegas Sands Corp. as the company's senior vice president of finance and strategy, put together the deal at the behest of his father-in-law, the chairman and CEO of the casino operator. Dumont, a 41-year-old from New York, in 2009 married Sivan Ochshorn, a daughter of Adelson's wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, from a prior marriage. Sivan Ochshorn Dumont runs the Israel Hayom, which is owned by the casino mogul.

• From a statement by the Adelson family, published Dec. 17, 2015 in the R-J as a companion piece: The Adelson family has called Las Vegas home for nearly 25 years. Through our business interests here we've helped employ tens of thousands of people and have been honored to provide support to many of this community's important charitable and civic organizations and causes. Today, we are proud to announce that the Adelson family has purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal through a wholly-owned fund, as both a financial investment as well as an investment in the future of the Las Vegas community … Our motivation for purchasing the R-J is simple. We believe in this community and want to help make Las Vegas an even greater place to live. We believe deeply that a strong and effective daily newspaper plays a critical role in keeping our state apprised of the important news and issues we face on a daily basis.

• Headline from a sidebar story published Dec. 17, 2015: Sheldon Adelson's newspaper buy has Nevadans talking, and some fretting

Since Adelson purchased the R-J, the paper has published a note at the end of articles about him, his family, the Las Vegas Sands Corp. and its business competitors.

The Adelson family paid $140 million for the R-J, about $38 million more than the previous owner, GateHouse Media had paid to Stephens Media just 10 months earlier in a deal that included other Stephens assets. GateHouse reported an estimated 69% gain on the transaction.

In a lawsuit against the R-J, the Sun contends the R-J violated the JOA in a number of ways, virtually eliminating profit-sharing payments to the Sun and omitting it from advertising and promotional materials. According to the Sun's complaint, the R-J's goal is for Adelson — a megadonor to the Republican Party — to monopolize the local newspaper market and silence opposing views to his right-leaning editorial perspective.

Part of the Sun's complaint involves the redesign of the Sun box on the front page of the R-J, which occurred after the Adelson family's purchase of the publication.

Tuesday, Jones complained that the R-J would face high costs for retrieving and presenting materials related to the redesign and that the requests would produce an inordinate amount of material. He also said the request would be intrusive to Adelson and Dumont.

"You don't go to Ford Motor Company and (ask for) every document Ford ever related to the Pinto," Jones said. "One thing I don't ever want to do is not protect my client's rights. We're going to run those searches, but I guarantee there's going to be an outrageously overbroad response that will cost my client potentially tens of thousands of dollars."

Williams said he would decide at a later date which Review-Journal principals would be subjected to an electronic material search relating to the redesign process.

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