Except he's not even giving the car back. Someone else is replacing the car and he's keeping what he took.

Much better anology, thanks

The only aspect I would add is that given the enormous unsecured loans and murky payments in play here it is a tricky spot. Why roil anything when it does seem likely most people will get their money. Oh wait, that is also what you said as well. I think this is all very smart. Right.

I disagree. I think they all accepted from nearly the beginning to use player funds to finance the growth of the business. After that Chris and Howard pretended to play dumb but they always knew things were not legitimate and would not hold up to real scrutiny. They played intereference for Bitar with the other owners. This is why no outside audits were ever seriously considered and this is why Bitar was not Insta fired when lederer and ferguson pretended to just find out about what was going on.

Bitar did most of the dirty work but this company was established from the beginning to be shady and all the board members knew what was going on.

The problem with casino markers unlike any other form of credit is they are treated as writing a bad check. Being unable to pay would have gotten Ivey arrested and given the amount probably prison time.

Not paying a casino marker is the only form of credit where non repayment is a crime and felony.

It is crazy to see Ivey so busto but anyone who bets any significant money on craps like Ivey did is a full blown degen.

bolded for emphasis

they knew after black friday they was no money in accounts to cover players funds, to say your funds are safe and secure , and its business as usual for rest of world. running promos and getting deposits from rest of world was a crime . outright theft with no way of repaying unless they sold company, all the board knew this howard knew this. they agreed on keeping it alive taking deposits, they agreed on not returning 1 penny in wrongful disbursments. hes seems very proud of the fact , he didnt return 1 cent to players, hes not sorry he took the money .

i think its ob now only reason why he did interviews is hes tryng to get back to live playing , not because of the ftp players wanting answers. hes has showed he never cared abou ftp players only himself. good reads df ty

This is NVG but I don't get this comment at all, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but many here are directly involved and have no intention of "moving on"

Just A Guy,

I agree with you on PI. Those blaming him for the fall of FTP have been easily tricked and mislead by the lederer Et al misdirection campaign. I do think Ivey is a degen with a big gambling problem who is good at poker.

It would be good for poker and the notion it is not gambling if so many top players were not massive gambling degens. Phil has his own issues but I have a hard time placing any blame on him for FTP. In fact he was trying to get away from that mess. In hindsight people should have took his lawsuit as a sign to cash out ASAP not as a misguided tool to blame him for what others did at FTP.

You're right that companies go busto every day. You're wrong that companies that are holding $300m of their customers money go busto every day.

Please list some other examples of companies who stole/spent $300m of their customers money and people just shrugged their shoulders and moved on. In any other cases of this (Enron, Madoff Securities etc..) people were held accountable and their was much 'drama'.

and jail time.

markksman,

Strong post. The notion that a frivolous lawsuit could bring down a billion $ company that had ~150m in payables due immediately (US), another ~160m in long term liabilities (RTO) and ~60m in cash is absurd.

I also have to call out the PPA a bit on the lawsuit aspect. Some pretty harsh stuff was said about PI right away. Seems probable the ftp relationship influenced the response.

OTOH Howard says PI was looking to distance from ftp right around the time the divorce is going on. Phil then hires his own lawyer to represent his wife in a settlement to give the ex-wife all the ftp distributions, forever. And nothing else. Oh yea and then they gave the judge who signs off on the divorce a big campaign donation. lol.

So he screwed his ex-wife, why should we care? Well it is not great form to then try to stop representing the company a year before bf, ask for ~10m 8 days before BF and then sue the company. Not great for all the ftp players that clicked on his face both before and after BF. It actually would have been shadier if the company was solvent. I think if he provided an explanation and a chunk of that Crawfords score to help resolve things then all is fine. He is mother-fn Phil Ivey.

I do think it is kind of funny he appears to owe CF about $5m as well.

DF if the nuts but I wish she would allow herself to elaborate on things she has already reported. With no follow-up, it leaves her alone to connect all the dots. NVG does crowd-sourced investigations very, very, well. Maybe she has everything so no-one is needed, I don't know. (Wait, did I just complain that someone doing incredible work practically for free won't talk here...jeez.)

Noah, are you embargoed as well? If no, then do you have a sense of whether whether PI's lawsuit was motivated by the divorce settlement? The desire to take down a bankrupt company that was still taking ROW? Simply a degen? You broke his loan issue so I suspect you know more here as well.

Part V is out:

http://diamondflushpoker.com/

^^^
ty

Wow. I guess she really isn't going to say much of any substance till part 7. She really is killing any buzz she had about these articles by going about it this way.

Is there any reason that these articles couldn't be written by anyone who followed the interviews in a fraction of the time?

In before 'I don't know. You're asking me to speculate.'

There is part of DF's Part V that I have some trouble with.

I don't agree with this assertion. The text of the Domain Name Agreement, which was made public almost immediately on signing, contains elements which led me to assume that the USAO had no idea whether ROW play was operating fully funded. Even in the absence of the text of the Agreement, I don't think a reasonable person would assume that the DoJ would bother itself about the liquidity of operations outside the US. If, susbsequent to the agreement, the DoJ didn't know FTP's financial situation and FTP went on to defraud ROW players, it wouldn't make the DoJ complicit.

I would be interested to know if there is anything besides speculation behind this paragraph. My thought is that if the DoJ wanted such assurance in advance, they would have made obtaining it an explicit part of the Domain Name Agreement. Instead the Agreement provides for indirect acccess to financial information at some point after the signing of the agreement. I have always interpreted the DoJ's various documents to indicate that they had no idea that FTP was so short of funds until after the Agreement was signed. Sure, they had reason to be aware of some hiccups with deposits and withdrawls, but so did attentive 2+2 readers. The DoJ had no more idea than we did that FTP were so far in the hole.

DF seems to be trying to build a case that FTP actively misled the DoJ prior to the signing of the Domain Name Agreement wrt their financial status. We know they gave false reprts to the AGCC for months if not years. However, without direct evidence, I think all we can conclude about what information the FTP gave the DoJ before the Domain Name Agreement is that it failed to provide a true picture of the situation, not that it actively painted a false picture. Of course, there is always the possiblity that DF has some evidence to back what seems now to be speculation.

Taken from part V

Lederer saying he never thought the shortfall report was a mistake due to how thorough they had to be when compiling it does not equal "by his own admission it wasn't surprising" and for DF to make that leap is pretty shoddy journalism and seriously impacts negatively on her credibility imo.

The first really clear proof that Lederer lied in the interviews (at least, the first I've seen) appears in pt5.

That's exactly the "feeling" I got from the 2p2 interview. HL feels like the assets of the company they built paid the tab and so they should be off the hook for the "distributions in error" paid out after they were insolvent.

Is that the case?...no...not really. I mean the company did still have alot of value, but that doesn't excuse skimming 150 million off the top (the approximate amount of "distributions in error" after they were operating in the red.) This also doesn't account for the fact that at the very least, interest on this money should be paid. US Players are without their money for 18 months and get no interest?

The DOJ doesn't see it that way, and any assets HL didn't manage to hide are going to go away most likely.

Here is what I think happened:

Bitar is running the show on his own for the most part in Dublin.
Seizures of funds from illegal cc processing start to happen.
Can't find any processors to run echecks...phantom deposits happen.
A huge hole develops starting at about $100m and ending up at $250m when black friday and more seizures happen.

This is where the story gets murky for me.

Did HL know about the financial situation the whole time? Was he in on the cover up?...or did Bitar decide at some point just to try to keep things looking like "business as usual" by continuing to pay out distributions while trying to find ways to process echecks and get things back on track.

My sense is that Bitar was "the guy on the ground in Dublin" and he was just scrambling to keep up appearances so that nobody flew in or called and asked too many questions until he could fix it...then black friday hit and everything blew up in their face.

Hellifiknow....I wish there were concrete evidence one could point to that HL and CF knew about the financial status before HL says they did.

The next huge blunder was continuing to take ROW deposits and encouraging them to continue playing on the site....obviously they were buried financially at that point and had the bright idea to use rake from ROW players to start to fill the void. Bad plan.

Just compounding stupid mistakes on on top of the other to try and dig out of the mess until it was obvious it wasn't gonna happen.

The disturbing thing to me is that at no point did they take action legal or otherwise to get back the "distributions in error" covering the 15 months that they were operating in the red (I believe there was direct language in their operating agreement that dealt with this). CF was the only one AFAIK to put money back in to the tune of 12m. HL kinda sloughed the question off multiple times in the 2p2 interview...more or less saying "Nobody else was giving back the money so I didn't either"

With full credit to DF for correctly and clearly citing the source of this image, this proof comes from an article I wrote published ~2 weeks ago.

I tend to doubt he was really lying at that point. It was such an easy thing to disprove, it seems like he may have simply been mistaken.

yeah sorry, I ought to have been clearer/cited your article myself. What I meant was it's the first time in this series that I've seen such clear evidence.