Numerous objections raised in opening day of Sands sanctions hearing

Opening day of a three-day hearing on Monday to determine whether Las Vegas Sands Corp. should face sanctions for its conduct in a lawsuit brought by former Sands China Ltd. CEO Steven Jacobs was cloaked in a mystery.

The testimony of two attorneys who formerly represented Sands China was punctuated by more than three dozen objections by Charles McCrea Jr., attorney for Las Vegas Sands, that their answers would violate the attorney-client privilege. Some of the questions were posed by Clark County District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, who called the hearing.

Apparently anticipating the objections, Gonzalez remarked after the first one, "I may make inferences and the inferences may be adverse (to Sands)."

Although she used the line a couple of other times, she never specified what "inferences" could include.

Gonzalez raised the possibility of sanctions in June after Sands disclosed that a computer hard drive containing about 100,000 emails and other documents sought by Jacobs as evidence had been transported to Las Vegas in 2010. For more than a year starting in mid-2011, Sands had contended in court that it could not turn over the hard drive because it was in Macau and covered by its Personal Data Protection Act.

Jacobs' attorneys have claimed that the hard drive incident was just a piece of a pattern obstructions Sands has erected to head off the wrongful-termination lawsuit he filed more than two years ago. To that end, Jacobs requested that sanctions include all the legal fees and costs tied to the hard-drive issues, reimbursement of court expenses incurred while trying to thread through the Macau law and bringing Sands China under American jurisdiction by throwing out its defense that it falls under the aegis of Macau courts.

Sands has contended that not disclosing the hard drive's whereabouts was an honest mistake. It will not sketch out its proposed penalties until after Gonzalez has ruled.

Patricia Glaser, the Los Angeles attorney who represented Sands China until February, testified that she and other lawyers had traveled to Macau in November 2010 to interview witnesses, but did not delve into the data protection act. But the act came up in another trans-Pacific trip six months later, when she decided to get an in-person explanation of the act .

And, she said, "We spend a lot of money, client's money" to send a legal team to pore over documents in Macau "because we were told they couldn't be reviewed anywhere else."

A subsequent attorney-client privilege objection cut off a follow-up question about the source of the stricture to review documents only in Macau.

At an unspecified point in 2011, Glaser, a self-described computer illiterate, said she learned that a hard drive had been shipped to Las Vegas, but did not know what was on it.