The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been calling up banks and lending institutions to help prop up the MGM Mirage.
Still, Kerkorian is not sitting around waiting for MGM Mirage’s next step.
One gaming analyst said Kerkorian and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a close friend, have been calling financial institutions to try and raise the remaining $1.2 billion needed to complete the $9.1 billion CityCenter development.
If that’s true, that seems like a pretty serious ethical tangle that Reid is getting himself into. Given that the Senate is almost certainly going to be passing a lot of banking legislation in the near future, Reid is risking a couple of things here. (1) He risks having a bank that can’t really afford it give MGM a loan out of fear of being targeted in new legislation. (2) He risks making it look like there’s a quid pro quo should any of the banks that make a loan do especially well as a consequence of future legislation.
Bottom line, a Senator doesn’t have any place trying to hit up banks for loans to a business he doesn’t have an interest in.
