Packer's $757m casino bid

AUSTRALIA'S richest man, Kerry Packer, is about to take his biggest gamble yet with a pound £'300million ($757 million) bet on the deregulation of the British gaming industry. Mr Packer, who has a personal fortune of more than $5billion, has teamed up with a British entrepreneur Damian Aspinall as the first part of a multi-staged assault on London's gaming market. Last week, Mr Packer announced plans for his private company Consolidated Press Holdings to build a new £ 50million leisure complex in Brierley Hill, north of London. The Weekend Australian can reveal Mr Packer is also planning to sink an additional £ 250million in building a further five casinos in Britain and has already begun negotiations with planners and authorities. There has also been discussions about listing the business on a stock market, although no decision has been taken. Mr Packer wants to cash in on major changes to Britain's antiquated gaming laws, due to take effect next year. The owner of the Nine Network is as famed for dropping tens of millions of dollars at gaming tables as he is for owning them. This time Mr Packer is jostling with some of the world's key casino players to grab a major slice of the international action in what is one of the few remaining gaming markets left to be deregulated. His listed company Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd grew from a media company into a broader entertainment business by participating in the deregulation of the Australian gaming market in the early 1990s. After a failed bid for Sydney's Star City Casino, PBL took over Melbourne's Crown casino from developer and Packer friend Lloyd Williams, and recently won a tough battle for control of Perth's Burswood Casino. It has, however, decided against direct participation in the opening up of gambling in the tiny province of Macau, where gaming turnover is soon expected to match that of Las Vegas. Analysts are predicting similar gains in England, where archaic gambling laws have kept the estimated number of Britons to have visited a casino to as low as 2 per cent of the population. Casino patrons have to register 24 hours before they can make a bet, the number of poker machines is limited by the number of gaming tables in a venue and jackpots are capped at pound £ 2000 pounds. But those laws are about to change. Already the Packers and Aspinalls are planning a chain called Aspers, partly named after the upmarket Aspinalls Casino in London's Mayfair. Consolidated Press Holdings already has a stake in Aspinalls, run by Damian Aspinall. There has been a long association between the two families. Mr Aspinall, 44, who has built a property fortune in his own right, is a colourful figure on the London scene. He was close to billionaire Sir James Goldsmith, who was a regular at his club, and he keeps a framed photograph of Goldsmiths daughter, Jemima Khan, in his office. The Australian