Casino firm in Malaysian joint venture

British casino operator Stanley Leisure has joined forces with a Malaysian firm in a bid to develop a network of Las Vegas-style sites, it emerged today.

It is hoped the joint venture with Genting, whose resort in south-east Asia attracts more than 15 million visitors a year, would allow the group to build so-called super casinos in regional cities such as Leeds.

Although the British government recently announced plans to initially scale back the number of large regional casinos to eight, Stanley Leisure expects that in the long term it could have up to 10 sites.

The joint venture will pay £5.4m (€7.7m) for land Stanley recently bought next to Leeds United’s Elland Road football ground.

Stanley, which has 41 casinos and a network of 660 betting shops, said last month that it hoped to use the site to build a regional casino complex costing up to £125m (€178.5m) which would rival any other development in the UK.

It said today that it would benefit from Genting’s expertise in running casinos on the scale of those envisaged for the UK.

Genting, which is listed on the Malaysian stock exchange, has businesses ranging from leisure and power generation to paper, oil and gas. It is also in the process of breaking into the UK market by joining Stanley in buying London’s Maxims casino.

The tie-up emerged as Liverpool-based Stanley revealed that a favourable set of sporting results for punters had affected its high street betting business.