Star Entertainment Group to fork out more than $36m if Brisbane Queen's Wharf sale to Hong Kong investors collapses
The casino operator last week told shareholders the pair of Hong Kong investors, Chow Tai Fook Enterprises and Far East Consortium, have threatened to ditch the agreement.
Each of the investors own 25 per cent of the Queen's Wharf venue respectively and have looked at purchase the remaining half.
An April 30 deadline to sign the deal, which gave Star $53m in cash and consolidated the company's Queensland operations to the Gold Coast, was never met.
The Hong Kong investors on June 30 notified Star of its intention to exit the deal which was set to come into effect on Monday.
Star on Monday told shareholders both parties have extended the deadline for the deal's termination date until July 31.
If a deal is not struck by the deadline, Star will have to repay a $10m cash injection from the Hong Kong investors and reimburse them $26.5m for previous contributions made towards the Brisbane venue.
The cash will need to be repaid within 30 days from July 7 while Star will have 60 days to repay the $26.5m if the deal falls through.
The failure of the Brisbane casino sale could be devastating for Star as the project has debts of about $1.6b.
Star selling the Queen's Wharf complex inspired US gaming giant Bally's Corporation to lob a takeover offer at the casino operator earlier this year.
The American company has been critical of the sale and told Sky News' Business Weekend it wanted to keep all of Star's assets.
'We want to keep everything together rather than strip it apart,' Bally's CEO Robertson Reeves said in April.
'We think that things tend to operate better if they're one larger organisation where you can actually generate benefits for each of the properties one by one by making one tweak in one place.'
Despite receiving the $300m takeover bid from Bally's alongside local publican Bruce Mathieson, Star still faces crippling financial woes.
It awaits a massive fine from financial crime watchdog AUSTRAC that could be upwards of $400m over historical misconduct and faces further regulatory measures aimed at stamping out money laundering.
It has received $58m from the sale of its Sydney casino's event centre and another $133m from the Bally's-Mathieson takeover.
Star was on the brink of administration earlier this year and was forced into a trading halt after it missed the deadline for its financial results for the first half of the 2025 financial year.
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