Tropicana Owner Trying to Block $700M Sale

ATLANTIC CITY-After months of searching, the troubled Tropicana Casino may have found a buyer–Baltimore-based Cordish Co. But Tropicana Entertainment insists that Cordish’s $700-million offer is too low and has announced its intentions to block the sale of the property.

Troubles at the Tropicana began in December 2007 when the Casino Control Commission refused to renew Tropicana’s casino license. The Atlantic City property was then placed under the supervision of a trustee, former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Gary Stein, who ordered the asset’s sale.

Experts estimated the 150,000-sf casino, 2,100-room hotel and an entertainment and retail complex would fetch as much as $1 billion. Bids of $850 million and $950 million were put on the table, but a spokesman with Stein’s office says the early bids didn’t work out. “Justice Stein believed that the bids received earlier this year were too low,” the spokesman says. “There was a perfect storm of events, including the economic downturn and the fact that the Tropicana’s former parent company filed for Chapter 11, which made it impossible to really conduct an appropriate bidding process back then.”