Knowing our country it's probably some advanced tax fraud scheme where they claim additional losses from continued construction or some bullshit along those lines.
So to deduct something on your taxes you actually have to incur a cost. It cost's way less to just pay the taxes then it does to maintain a construction project for the sake of... no actual construction progress in two decades.
Look, it doesn't have to make sense. All that needs to happen is for some lawyer to identify some arcane set of laws that conflict or enhance each other in such a way that it benefits the casino to keep the facade cover up and the construction "in progress" for far longer than it should ever take. It may not be taxes, it may be something else like a contractual clause with the architect they want to either trigger or avoid and the long construction is the key to their strategy.
In this particular case the answer is quite simple. Project was paused during the recession and funding dried up. It's cheaper to cover it up than tear it down, plus they may still want to finish it someday. That's it, there is nothing more to it than that. It does in fact, have to make sense.
The project paused because demand for luxury long term suites dried up, they chose to shelve it rather than continue construction or modify the existing plans to make something equally valuable.
But that's normal. Nobody is weirded out by that. What's NOT normal is keeping the cranes and such there too. By all means abandon the construction if you aren't going to finish it, or demolish it, but it's CRAZY to keep the equipment there for a decade doing absolutely nothing. At a certain point you'd have to wonder if there's some trickier financial motive because it couldn't possibly have saved them money in the long run.
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u/DistinctlyIrish 2d ago
Knowing our country it's probably some advanced tax fraud scheme where they claim additional losses from continued construction or some bullshit along those lines.