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About Rodeo Drive
IPI now has until this Friday to find a new lawyer to carry the six-case workload Hasselback had, but will most likely use this as an excuse to delay the ongoing legal battles. It won’t get very far with that, though, and perhaps Judge Kennedy expected IPI to try something. She added in her ruling that the attorney’s exit “may cause some delay, [but] that delay is not so much so that it would cause significant prejudice or adversely and materially affect the plaintiff.”
This particular lawsuit involving Fox Financial, one of a growing list IPI is battling, centers on an arrangement the company made with a third party, Forson Holdings. That entity had leased property from Fox in 2016, but fell behind. IPI had signed as a guarantor of that lease agreement and, as such, was responsible for covering Forson in the event payments weren’t made. However, it decided it didn’t need to follow the terms of the contract.
It seems like not a day goes by without IPI coming under fire for something else. The company’s chairwoman, Cui Li Jie, has already found herself in trouble and was previously held in contempt of court, but now has another black mark beside her name. She has been found in contempt again, this time for allegedly perjuring herself in court. A lawyer representing employees suing IPI and Cui produced evidence proving she had lied under oath, and Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona has now agreed. She issued her ruling this morning, with Cui only able to respond, through an interpreter, “I don’t know anything, I don’t understand English.”
What is Rodeo Drive?
The legal wrangling extends to Michigan, where Attorney General Dana Nessel has rejected Polymarket and the CFTC’s arguments that the Michigan Gaming Control Board has no regulatory authority over prediction markets, even the ones allowing traders to buy and sell shares of sports outcomes.
Since returning its prediction market to the US, Polymarket has regularly engaged in nonconforming advertising. Painting a water tower in the company’s blue and branding the structure with its logo is the firm’s latest marketing ploy.
In March, Polymarket opened The Situation Room, a pop-up “newsbar” in Washington, DC. The bar and lounge’s televisions played various content related to prediction markets, like Bloomberg Terminals, cable news, and live social media feeds that were “dedicated to monitoring the situation.”
What is Rodeo Drive?
Cleopatra’s Barge opened in September 1970 in what is now the Nobu Hotel tower, replacing the earlier Nero’s Nook lounge. The 180-seat lounge featured as its centerpiece a “floating” stage designed as a replica of the vessel aboard which the Egyptian queen is said to have bewitched Mark Antony.
The pleasure craft, installed in a shallow lagoon, featured a gold-painted, topless figurehead that extended far into the public walkway. Guests quickly turned rubbing the statue’s golden breasts for luck into a classic Vegas tradition; staff regularly repainted the most-touched areas.
Vital Vegas ranked the display No. 4 on his 2014 list of “10 Things You Can Rub for Good Luck in Las Vegas Without Getting Arrested,” a list that featured three other Caesars Palace entries: the hand of the Caesars statue (No. 1); Joe Louis’s boxing gloves (No. 8); and the toe of Michelangelo’s David replica (No. 9).
The barge itself never actually floated, by the way. That was just a myth. It sat on a fixed platform that created a mild rocking motion. That piece of Vegas engineering, like the statue’s original perch, is now history.
