Mike Leven | Former Las Vegas Sands number two steps down

Michael Leven (center)

Las Vegas Sands (LVS) announced yesterday [Macau time] that longtime board member and former president, Michael Leven has decided to retire from the company’s board of directors.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which was incidentally bought by Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Sheldon Adelson’s family in December, Leven will also retire from the subsidiary, Sands China, to be made effective immediately.
Leven was named as LVS president in 2009 as the company was expanding its presence in Macau and eager to enter Singapore. He presided over the office during one of the company’s greatest periods of growth, and acted as Adelson’s ‘number two’.
LVS informed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday [Macau time] but did not specify why Leven was retiring. He had been serving on the boards of directors for Las Vegas Sands and Sands China since December 2014 when he formally retired as president. Robert Goldstein succeeded Leven as president and chief operating officer.
Speaking to the Times in an exclusive interview in 2013, Michael Leven recognized the need for Macau to diversify from gaming operations, stressing the potential to develop the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) sector.
Pointing to the example of Las Vegas, which Macau government officials have typically eyed with an enthusiastic willingness to imitate, Leven said, “it [Vegas] would not be successful [today] if the mid-week business of meetings and conventions, the MICE business, wasn’t there.”
He also warned, “[if] Macau is to be the Las Vegas of Asia, you can’t be that reliant only on one-day trip gamblers.”
While Leven prophesized that the biggest growth in Macau’s gaming would come from the mass market and the mass-mass market in the future (those betting mostly on slot machines and electronic tables), he also predicted, “VIP [gaming] is going to continue to have moderate growth [in the future],” about nine months before revenues started their unprecedented decline.
Leven was previously the chief executive of U.S. Franchise Systems Inc., a company he founded in 1995 that franchised the Microtel Inns & Suites and Hawthorn Suites hotel brands. He also served briefly as president of Holiday Inn Worldwide, Days Inn of America and Americana Hotels. DB