Star Entertainment has come under renewed regulatory scrutiny after leaked internal records revealed shrinking compliance teams, growing backlogs, and pressure to keep customers gambling.
The Sydney Morning Herald cited multiple anonymous sources in its report, with one insider describing the group’s problem-gambling approach as “appalling.”
Group compliance headcount fell from 17 to just four this year, while the group risk team dropped from five to two employees.
Star’s investigations team nearly halved during the first six months of 2026, and guest support officers warned they lacked sufficient staff to identify customers showing signs of gambling harm.
A January memo described the staffing shortage as creating a “significant and escalating” regulatory risk, with another warning that Star could no longer sustain commitments made to regulators in New South Wales and Queensland.
The concerns sit alongside a wider push to retain patrons, with new CEO Bruce Mathieson Jnr urging staff in a May email to work on “saving each and every customer.”
That message challenged existing practices around exclusions, time-play controls, security withdrawals, and financial crime management across Star’s operations.
Internal case files give the situation a sharper edge, revealing a Brisbane pensioner receiving A$550 a week in welfare benefits gambled almost 400 hours over 14 months and lost more than A$65,000 despite estimated net wealth below A$49,000.
A second gambler lost A$110,000 over 210 hours between March 2023 and February 2025, then lost another A$100,000 through June 2026, with Star records indicating he used payday lenders on an estimated annual income of A$55,000.
Financial crime failures also featured prominently in the leaked material, with Star carrying 1,456 outstanding enhanced customer due diligence checks as of 31 December, plus 1,057 delayed licence withdrawals involving problematic patrons.
A separate file revealed approximately 270,000 Factiva reports had gone unactioned, with the backlog stretching an extraordinary 699 days.
Other records described weak transaction-monitoring guidance for telegraphic transfers of A$25,000 or more and identified a system gap that made detecting multiple customer accounts significantly harder.
These problems follow years of regulatory intervention, with inquiries in NSW and Queensland previously finding Star unsuitable to hold casino licences and regulators imposing A$100 million fines in each state.
Internal correspondence also raised questions over financial forecasts for the Brisbane casino, with one ambitious model projecting a 25% revenue increase and 236% EBITDA growth, targeting A$596.5 million in revenue and A$168.8 million in EBITDA.
A senior manager warned Star would go “nowhere near achieving” those figures, while Star Brisbane CFO Richard Chan stated the alternate budget was only for internal use and, as far as he knew, was not shared with banks.
Governance concerns also extended to who could gamble at Star properties, with internal records stating staff regarded a high-roller access request from Far East Consortium chairman David Chiu as “highly inappropriate.”
Mathieson backed Chiu’s case, calling objections “ridiculous,” and reportedly attempted to find a way to circumvent the controls in place at the time.
The leaked material further detailed significant management instability, with four Brisbane general managers resigning under new ownership and Star cycling through three chief risk officers during that same period.
Dave Whimpey, appointed chief operating officer and interim CEO of The Star Brisbane in March after Mathieson recruited him to strengthen leadership, was dismissed for misconduct just 10 days after starting following complaints from two female employees.
Whimpey denied wrongdoing, called the process a “witch-hunt,” and said he had raised serious governance concerns during his brief tenure, though he declined to describe them in detail.
