A senior executive for the firm behind the Imperial Palace Saipan has reportedly declared that his company is ‘working diligently’ to complete the property in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands after last summer opening the first-phase gaming portion of the giant integrated casino resort.

According to a Monday report from GGRAsia, the revelation came from Lu Hou Tsai, Operations Senior Vice-President for Imperial Pacific International Holdings Limited, via an interview conducted during last week’s Japan Gaming Congress 2018. The executive also purportedly stated that there are in excess of 1,000 workers from a United States-headquartered firm currently on site endeavoring to finish the $650 million venue’s planned 350-room hotel and 15 villas.

“This project will go through,” Tsai reportedly told GGRAsia in Tokyo. “We are working diligently to get the hotel up because, once the hotel is up, that will further assist us in increasing our cash flow. It’s not conducive to business when you have customers staying at ‘this hotel, that hotel’.”

GGRAsia reported that the Hong Kong-listed operator is continuing its search for additional investors in the Saipan project while Tsai moreover declared that the firm’s ongoing construction efforts had been given the green light by the United States Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA).

“OSHA has come in and given us the blessing so we are 100% good to go as far as ramping up our construction efforts are concerned,” Tsai reportedly told GGRAsia.

In order to keep the gaming portion of its Imperial Palace Saipan open beyond the end of the summer, Imperial Pacific International Holdings Limited is reportedly required to have completed construction on a minimum amount of hotel rooms by August 31. With this deadline looming, the firm purportedly detailed via a portion of its April 27 annual financial results that it had filed a ‘deadline extension application’ with Saipan’s Commonwealth Casino Commission and that its directors were ‘of the opinion’ that just such an continuance would be granted.