Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire international casino mogul and a top GOP contributor to several super PACs that mostly supported Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, stated that his Las Vegas Sands Corporation “likely” violated federal law against bribing foreign officials.
“In its annual regulatory report published by the commission on Friday, the Sands reported that its audit committee and independent accountants had determined that ‘there were likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions’ of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” the New York Times reports:
 The disclosure comes amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the company’s business activities in China.
 It is the company’s first public acknowledgment of possible wrongdoing. Ron Reese, a spokesman for the Sands, declined to comment further.
The company’s activities in mainland China, including an attempt to set up a trade center in Beijing and create a sponsored basketball team, as well as tens of millions of dollars in payments the Sands made through a Chinese intermediary, had become a focus of the federal investigation, according to reporting by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in August.
Open Secrets lists Adelson and his wife as the top individual funding outside spending groups, contributing almost $93 million to primarily conservative candidates in the 2012 election cycle.
Think Progress adds Adelson “spent as much as $150 million on independent expenditures to bolster Republicans in the 2012 election, and posits that “[s]ince the election, Adelson said that [he] plans to double his contributions to Republican candidates and with an estimated net worth of almost $25 billion, he could theoretically spend $500,000 on every single Republican House and Senate nominee for the next 186 years.”
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Image by Bectrigger via Wikimedia