Meier Group calls for halting the opening of Talca casino
Grupo Meier's claim is supported by an acknowledgment from the regulator itself. Through Ordinary Official Letter 1,559, dated August 26, 2025, the Superintendence of Gaming Casinos of Chile admitted that it did not conduct any new evaluation regarding the origin or sufficiency of the funds that would cover more than 10 billion additional pesos for the Talca casino project. The appeal that the group filed with the Comptroller General of the Republic is based on this admission.
The unreviewed jump is considerable. The investment committed by Sociedad de Ríos Claros, part of Dreams, climbed from the 6.069 billion pesos initially budgeted to 16.089 billion, an increase of 165 percent, while the built area jumped from 7,056 square meters to 43,700.
The document was signed by lawyer Pablo Berwart Tudela on behalf of Casino de Juego de Talca S.A., the Grupo Meier company that currently operates the casino in that city, and is addressed to Comptroller Dorothy Pérez. What it requests is that the Superintendence be ordered to refrain from issuing the certificate that enables the start of operations of the Dreams facility.
The appeal challenges a previous decision by the supervisory body itself. On August 5, through Official Letter 146546-2026, the Comptroller's Office decided not to rule on the alleged irregularities because there were two pending complaints before the Supreme Court and considered that the matter was already subject to judicial proceedings. Grupo Meier describes this reasoning as absolutely flawed and distinguishes between the levels: the lawsuits in court aim to annul previous resolutions due to land or deadline issues, while the administrative complaint seeks to establish only one thing: whether the Superintendence complied with its obligations.
The sharpest argument is about the regulator's internal consistency. According to the submission, in the processes of Chiloé and Coyhaique, also awarded to Dreams, the Superintendence applied strict criteria and rejected them due to equivalent financial problems. In Talca, however, it accepted a financing structure whose realization depended in turn on obtaining the operating permit.
Therefore, the request is not to annul but to freeze: that the casino not open until an exhaustive and traceable audit of the financing of the entire modified project is carried out. The justification they invoke is the temporal scale of what is at stake, a business that will operate under an exceptional regime for the next 15 years.
It is worth remembering that this dispute already had a round. The Seventh Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals dismissed the group's claims of illegality in February 2025 and upheld, at the administrative level, the license that Dreams had won in November 2023 through Ríos Claros.
Tags: Grupo Meier, Dreams, Superintendency of Gaming Casinos, Dorothy Pérez, Talca