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ICYMI: Timeshare company with close Laxalt ties generated dozens of customer complaints to then-AG’s office [The Nevada Independent]

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The Nevada Independent: Timeshare company with close Laxalt ties generated dozens of customer complaints to then-AG’s office
By Jacob Solis
September 22, 2022

Key Points:

  • Starpoint Resort Group — a Nevada-based timeshare company that has for years maintained financial ties to the campaigns of Republican Senate candidate and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt — generated dozens of customer complaints sent to the attorney general’s office during Laxalt’s tenure, according to documents reviewed by The Nevada Independent.
  • Those documents, including hundreds of pages of redacted complaint filings and emails, show at least 91 customer complaints against Starpoint filed with the attorney general’s office between 2015 and 2019.
  • Several of the complaints allege that the company — through its subsidiary timeshare companies — misled or deceived customers and violated the state’s deceptive trade practices law.
  • Starpoint and its CEO, Michael Muldoon, have for years given substantial sums to Laxalt’s political campaigns, cumulatively giving his bids for attorney general, governor and senator more than $50,000 between 2014 and 2021. That money includes $30,000 given directly to Laxalt’s 2018 gubernatorial bid, as well as $20,000 contributed between 2014 and 2015. Most recently, Muldoon maxed out personal contributions to Laxalt’s Senate bid with $5,800 in 2021.
  • Starpoint separately contributed another $30,000 to Laxalt’s political action committee, Morning in Nevada PAC, between 2016 and 2019.
  • Laxalt also met with Muldoon in January 2015, just weeks after his swearing-in, according to an official calendar reviewed by The Nevada Independent.
  • In 2019, Laxalt later re-entered the private sector as an attorney for Washington, D.C.-based firm Cooper & Kirk, where he made more $3 million, according to financial disclosures submitted as part of his Senate campaign. There, per those disclosures, he maintained a list of just eight clients, among them Starpoint Resort Group.
  • Some customer complaints about Starpoint, including ones made to the online review site Yelp, allege aggressive sales tactics such as the use of loud music that obscured information during timeshare presentations that sometimes lasted “hours,” often on the promise of gambling money or show tickets.
  • Others claim that sales representatives presented misleading or incomplete information, allegedly locking customers into contracts in which they could not exercise timeshare “points” despite investing thousands of dollars into those timeshares.
  • Starpoint was also later sued by multiple plaintiffs in Clark County District Court in 2019 over deceptive trade practices, including allegedly misleading customers over a provision that would have transferred debts and “ever-rising maintenance fees” to their “future family generations” — a clause salespeople characterized as a “transferable asset” that could be included in a will.

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