Circumscribing administrative discretion passes first and foremost from regulating the process of decision-making. When the content of decisions is bound by a legal rule, legal compliance is more straightforward than when there is a margin of appreciation and choice. These developments have added a new meaning to the implementation of the rule of law. The expansion of state activities, including economic and social regulation and welfare service provision, has blurred the old politics–administration distinction since more and more decisions are delegated by parliaments to the administration, endowing it with wide discretionary powers. The two traditions also differ regarding the role of the courts and particularly their possibility to shape rules (common law tradition) or to apply rules (continental tradition). The second relies on ordinary courts and characterizes the Anglo-American system of common law. It assigns judicial review to specialized administrative courts and involves a special branch of law, that is, administrative law. The first characterizes continental Europe. Two major traditions can be mainly distinguished.
Regimes of judicial control vary in legal and administrative systems. It refers to the power of the courts to consider whether the actions of public authorities respect the limits prescribed by law. “Whether the commission directed such a compelled transfer of property, or merely accepted it as a cure to its concerns about undisclosed criminal ownership interests at FBT, cannot be decided without further discovery,” he added.Judicial control over the bureaucracy is a means to defend the rule of law and important principles of democratic governance. Instead of completing or concluding its investigation of the ownership interests in FBT, the commission made favorable consideration of the application subject to lowering the amount of money the owners of FBT would receive for the property, thereby giving one private party, Wynn, a multimillion-dollar windfall at the expense of another private party, FBT,” wrote Kafker. It claims the regulator threatened to disadvantage Wynn’s licensing application if it didn’t comply. This was to assuage the regulator’s misplaced concerns about Lightbody, argues the lawsuit.
That was the land’s assessed value if it had been restricted from hosting a casino. Windfall for WynnįBT claims the MGC pressured Wynn Resorts in 2014 into reducing the price to $35 million. The judge in that case noted that there was nothing in Massachusetts law that prohibited a felon from profiting from the sale of an asset to a casino company, only from actual gaming operations. State prosecutors later sued FBT for fraud, alleging that two directors, Anthony Gattineri and Dustin DeNunzio, had attempted to conceal Lightbody’s ongoing stake.Īll three were indicted on federal fraud charges, but cleared in 2016. Massachusetts gaming law prohibits felons profiting from the casino industry.įTB maintained that convicted criminal Charles Lightbody had divested himself of his interest in the company a year before Wynn resorts came knocking.
But the land only sold for $35 million.Ī year earlier, while the MGC was doing due diligence on Wynn Resorts, investigators became concerned that FBT was concealing a hidden director with alleged links to organized crime. Wynn agreed to purchase the land for $75 million if it won the licensing bid, which it did, in 2015.
#Judicial scrutiny license
In 2012, Wynn Resorts entered into a conditional agreement with FBT to buy the land, a contaminated former chemical plant on the Mystic River.Ī year earlier, state residents had voted to legalize casinos, and Wynn was fiercely contesting the sole East Massachusetts gaming license with Mohegan Sun. Kafker wrote that the nature of the commission’s regulatory action was “highly unusual.” Hidden Felon The suit was thrown out by the lower court last summer – wrongly, according to Justice Scott Kafker in an opinion released Monday. (Image: Boston Globe)Ī lawsuit brought by the former landowner, FBT Everett Realty, alleges the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) improperly coerced Wynn Resorts into reducing the plot’s purchase price by $40 million. Charles A Lightbody, above, was a hidden director of FBT, but he and two directors were acquitted of fraud by a federal jury in 2016. Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court has ordered a lower court to reexamine the circumstances surrounding Wynn Resorts’ purchase of the land on which the Encore Boston Harbor now stands.