The offices of Saipan Casino operator Imperial Pacific International (IPI) was recently raided yet again by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) according to a report which was published by reliable gaming news source Calvinayre.com.
e States of America and hence falls under the FBI’s duties of influence. The FBI are also believed to have searched Torres home and vehilce and the offices of a law firm being run by Torres brothers. FBI Honolulu Media Coordinator Jason White revealed to KUAM News that the FBI had to beef up our presence in Saipan in order to execute all of the warrants well and simultaneously.
IPI issued a statement which assured CNMI residents that “we continue to be law abiding and good corporate citizens.” IPI pledged to cooperate with law enforcement authorities, insisting that it had “nothing to hide.”
The governors office also said in a statement that there was no reason for concern. In a personal statement, Torres said that he had the highest respect for law enforcement and would provide “the fullest measure of cooperation to any of the FBI’s requests of me and of my staff.”
The FBI and IPI do have an interesting history of working together. Back in March 2017, the FBI performed a raid of IPI’s offices and later revealed that the produce had been sparked by allegations of a federal violation of the workplace visa system which essentially means hiring illegal construction workers from China to come in and complete IPI’s delayed Imperial Palace Resort.
Unfortunately this type of behavior is very common among building operations. They will often illegally bring in workers from third-world nations to perform labor. These workers are almost always willing to work at rates which are below the legal wage limit. In addition to this, most of the workers are not educated on their workplace rights and are often made to work illegally long hours and also are made to work in dangerous conditions.
The FBI reportedly came back in March 2018 and then made vague references about public corruption being a top criminal investigative priority. The raids happened shortly after Bloomberg reported that IPI had made millions of dollars in payments to family members of Gov.Torres which led to other CNMI politicians claiming that IPI actually runs the government which is an absurd statements even though they may actually be in possession of large amounts of capital.
Legislation does exist which means that IPI does not have to pay taxes on their gaming revenue. The company has struggled financially for several years and experienced a net loss of 240 million dollars during the first half of 2019. They have also been accused of failing to pay their taxes to the CNMI government requires of them.
