Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday that if Imperial Pacific International (CNMI) LLC cannot pay its arrears, then the Commonwealth has to take the \u201cnext step.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that IPI can take care of their pending issues,\u201d said Torres in response to a question during a radio news briefing if he has ideas of IPI\u2019s future and if anybody else were to take over, and if he and then the commission were likely to approve that.<\/p>\n
The governor noted that, although he didn\u2019t thoroughly read it in the news, there was a federal court judgment that awarded millions of dollars to IPI\u2019s former employees in a labor case.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that they can pay their arrears in order for them to move forward, or us for that matter,\u201d Torres said. <\/p>\n
The judgment that Torres was referring to was a $5.91-million default judgment that U.S. District Court for the NMI Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona issued in favor of seven Chinese construction workers, who had sued IPI for allegedly subjecting them to forced labor while working then on IPI\u2019s casino\/resort project in Garapan. <\/p>\n
Torres said a lot of issues involving IPI are before the courts. He said if IPI cannot move forward with the casino industry, whoever is next in line, the government will make that decision with the Legislature when it comes.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut as of now I hope that they can take care of their arrears and continue to do business here. But if not, then we have to take the next step and we move on,\u201d the governor said.<\/p>\n
Last April 22, the Commonwealth Casino Commission board ordered the indefinite suspension of IPI\u2019s gaming license and directed IPI to pay $6.6 million in total penalty within six months and pay immediately $15.5 million and $3.1 million in annual casino exclusive license fee and annual casino regulatory fee, respectively. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday that if Imperial Pacific International (CNMI) LLC cannot pay…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-345263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-cnmi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}