Chanos says his conflict in Walters land deal gone

Wednesday, June 21, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.

Nevada Attorney General George Chanos, whose personal land deal led the state to hire an outside law firm to investigate the controversial Bill Walters project in Las Vegas, said Tuesday he would eventually step back into the Walters case to decide whether there should be any prosecutions.

In a televised interview on "Face to Face With Jon Ralston" on Las Vegas ONE, Chanos said he no longer is restricted by the potential conflict of interest that led to the hiring last year of the San Francisco law firm Senn Meulemans to investigate, for a fee of up to $265,000, Walters' proposed Royal Links Golf Club land deal.

Chanos initially felt he could not get involved in the Walters investigation because his own land deal was pending before the Las Vegas City Council. Earlier this year, the council approved a rezoning request for a high-rise project, paving the way for Chanos and his business partners to make a multimillion-dollar profit from that land sale, which closed in February.

"The conflict's gone as far as I'm concerned," Chanos told Ralston. "I believe that I am unfettered now."

Chanos said he would await completion of the investigative report - now about seven months in the making - and then determine whether his office will take any further action.

"Based on what I see, we'll make decisions as an office either to say, 'You know something? There was nothing here, we checked the public record, everyone now knows there was nothing here,' or, 'There's something here, or there's something further we need to do,' " Chanos said. "I can't make those decisions now because I have no idea what the report is going to say."

While awaiting the outcome of that investigation, the Las Vegas City Council has indefinitely postponed a decision on whether to accept Walters' $7.2 million offer to lift a deed restriction on the golf course to convert it to a residential development. Walters, who purchased the property in 1999 with the condition that it be used only as a golf course, now argues that Royal Links would not be economically viable in the long term because of oversaturation of local courses and other changes in the golf market.

Chanos conceded that the investigation is taking longer than he and Gov. Kenny Guinn had hoped, but he defended Senn Meulemans' professionalism.

Chanos acknowledged that Walters had not yet been interviewed as part of the investigation, but said that is not unusual.

"You would want to get the information from all of the supporting players so that your interview could be very intelligent and you would know all the facts before you started talking to him," Chanos said. "If he started saying things that didn't ring true, you'd know."

On another subject, in response to a Los Angeles Times series earlier this month alleging that Nevada judges had conflicts of interest due to campaign contributions and the hiring of friends to perform various court functions, Chanos insisted that the problems of Nevada's judicial system are no worse than those in California.

"I believe it's incumbent on the legal community to police its own participants," he said. "I believe that the state Supreme Court, the Commission on Judicial Discipline and the State Bar need to take the point, need to take the leading role in reforming the system."