Alon Las Vegas, the casino resort proposed for the former Frontier site on Las Vegas Boulevard across from the Wynn, lost its primary backer this month when Crown Resorts announced it was withdrawing from the project.
Despite the departure of the Australia-based Crown, whose principal shareholder is billionaire businessman James Packer, the founders and developers of Alon affirmed that they would continue working on the resort development. The Alon team includes former Wynn president Andrew Pascal.
"Crown was providing a substantial amount of reliant equity capital and now we have to go find somebody else," Pascal told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "The project is still viable, it's very compelling, it provides compelling returns and I would say in some cases, it might open up and create new opportunities where there were prospective investors that we talked to in the past that were potentially looking to come into the project but because they couldn't come in in a more meaningful way, they elected not to."
According to a release from Alon, the project has been in planning and development for two years and is "shovel-ready."