Except to Howard, she told him.

In this part he is looking pretty good.
It confirms he really put the players' interest first and his version of the PI lawsuit.

All these stories about investors shouldn't come as a surprise, many tried their own coup and in the end it was all about power and money. HL had more incentive to close a deal fast than most other members, because his name was being dragged through the mud every day.

nope

it makes the other shareholders and especially the board looking as bad as him. that´s a huge difference. about howards priorities it think that you are speculating.

Howard steppin up and getting his house appraised first. Nice!

I felt like in this section, DF misinterprets HL's statement. It seemed clear to me at the time of the interview that he was talking about taking ownership of the problem as opposed to assigning blame. You see this sort of tension a lot in the business world, where when something goes wrong, there is always a type of person who is so overly focused on assigning blame and meting out punishment that it distracts from the often more productive activites of assessing damages and discovering solutions.

Her final statement may very well be true and I'm not trying to argue anything beyond what I've said above (i.e., I'm not sure that keeping Ray on was a good decision, etc). I do think she's taking an overly literal view of his statements in this spot and finds a contradiction that doesn't necessarily exist.

In any event, it's a small point. I just think it highlights an interesting dynamic in human behavior.

One of the first and most important steps in problem solving is identifying the problem. Here's a simple example of why it's so important. A friend of mine noticed some paint peeling in his upstairs bathroom. He noticed it, scraped the paint and repainted. A few weeks later same thing happened. He decided to try a different paint. Scraped, painted. A few weeks later he was scraping, spackling and repainting with a more expensive paint. A few weeks later when the peeling happened again he asked me if I knew of a good bathroom paint that won't peel. After describing how many times he repainted in the past few months I knew there was something else going on. One day when it was raining I took a peek up in his attic and saw there was a leak around his vent stack that was dripping on the drywall above where the paint kept peeling. He got the leak fixed and the paint stopped peeling. Had he stopped to look at what the cause of the problem was he could have resolved the problem sooner, saved the hassle of repainting multiple times and not have to deal with the mold situation that developed.

In the case of FTP it was important to determine why the company had the problems it had. It seems that a big part of the problem was due to incompetent management. If that's the case then you don't want the same people that did such a poor job of running the company being in charge of the disaster recovery.

Im a huge fan of DF, but the Ivey stuff feels a bit personal.

I stopped reading after reading part 3. =( tell me if there's anything good.

Diamond Flush- I find your language increasingly vague and now focused on a PI tangent about 2009 that smells like a random leak (and irrelevant to the Lederer files.) Why? I know you are better than this. External pressure perhaps?

"There are those who say..." It sounds like you had to lawyer up yourself. Have you posted on 2+2 since Mason came out with this:

I also agree with Mike Johnson that Diamond Flush should identify herself (and I have no idea who she is). This is especially true if you're going to be accusing someone of specific wrong doing (which is the way I interpret her comments). In addition, true identification gives you more credibility as readers can get a better understanding of exactly who you are.

Best wishes,
Mason

I suppose I am grasping for excuses on your behalf because I find myself agreeing with tamiller and others that the series is getting weak. You are ignoring the relevance of crowd-sourced investigation in favor of a single sourced denouement that could be easily forgotten.

Mike Johnson- Did it bother you that the founder of this site expressed his concerns about another reporter directly after speaking with HL? Why would her anonymity bother you enough to make an issue of it? Did you bring up DF's anonymity with Mason or did he bring it up with you after speaking with Howard?

NoahSD: Can you weigh in here? Your hard work is getting lost. Why are you self-embargoed?

The coments on Phil Ivey are relevent to the Lederer files becouse it relates to stuff Lederar said in the Lederer files

I finally see where this is going. I came up with my own Hollywood story before reading any of this, and I was a little off:

Relevant/ Related

[x] PI asking for 10-20m on or about April 8th
[x] All PI distributions go to wife
[x] Lawsuit
[ ] Phil does not want to do a promo tour for free in 2009

I don't know maybe she is trying to show that there was a long simmering feud with the companies best marketing asset. I would be more willing to put an "x" there if it was even part of the Lederer files. It sure seems like more anti-Phil leaking to me. Seems likely to be from the Ifrah camp who would have been looped in via Ray etc. Look, I am sure this is all heading somewhere. I just wish her process did not disavow collaboration (thus far.) If nothing else, one thing the whole ftp saga shows is that transparency is a good thing and a centralized process shrouded in secrecy is not.

[x] Just_a_guy dangerously close to concern trolling

Ivey and Lederer truly deserve each other.

Yeah but there's a difference between assigning blame for the sake of being vindictive and finding the root of the problem for the sake of fixing it.

Obv HL felt that people were trying to find out who caused the problem for unconstructive reasons.

Like with many things HL related one can start with a logical premise and then apply it to self-serving and bizarre scenario. Example: It would be unconstructive to fire someone who could easily get oneself arrested therefore it is logical to pay someone 200k a month to.... do what?

His opinion obviously isn't worth much. People who don't want to find out the cause of the problem usually have something to hide.

You're telling me that if you invested a lot of money to start a company that winds up being successful and later it gets destroyed by bad decisions, bad management, theft and fraud, you wouldn't want to know why?

The Board had a high duty to watch over the players money and they did not do that.

If I was a founder I would have suggested segregated accounts. Regardless, I would have wanted to know on a regular basis:

How much money we owed the players. 2. How much money we had.

A. Duty and obligation. I would view this as my duty and obligation; especially with this type of company and this allegedly powerful CEO.

B. Self-interest. My dividends are based on these two figures. Maybe I would find FTP had an extra 500,000,000 lying around over and above the player money and I would ask for a dividend increase.

I could just as well point at that if your solution is always to fire the person who made bad decisions without ever examining other factors like company culture, training, or oversight processes (or lack thereof), then you are more like the guy who keeps repainting the bathroom wall than you are similar to the one who finds the leak.

The scope of my argument is super narrow, however, and doesn't require that you agree with this point.

This is the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter if you agree with HL here, the point is that DF doesn't properly interpret what he's saying.

Again, the point here is a narrow one. Simply put, it's that when HL says, "in situations like that it’s very difficult to get people to take responsibility for the problem. And people have to take responsibility for the problem before they really feel like they need to fix the problem," DF presents it as contradictory to facts that if anything support that he felt this way. It's a minor point, but one that I think almost anyone with any business experience would understand.

There's no larger point here. (Although, I guess, if one wanted to do so they could argue that it's a minor blow to DF's credibility as her articles basically put us in the position of trusting her ability to properly interpret and relay the information she receives from her sources.)

For one thing, I think you're underestimating the extent to which the major problems were understood at this point. Of course owners will want to know what went wrong, but once you have a basic understanding of how things went down, you don't want to see strategy meetings get bogged down by people who would rather harp on the bad decisions that were made instead of offering contructive suggestions as to how to proceed. Perhaps at some point you decide you do need to unseat the board and get rid of Ray, but you can't even have a successful discussion in that regard if everyone is busy bickering over who did what when and why instead of taking ownership of the problem.

That having been said, I don't want to make too big a point of this as you don't have to accept it as true in order to understand that the contradiction that DF sees in HL's statement is not real. All you have to do is make a reasonable inference about what he was trying to say.

You could point that out but it would be completely stupid to make that assumption.

Speaking of bickering, that's kind of a funny point to make since I wasn't assuming that it would be "your solution." I admit I used that phrase but your assumption that I was assuming something about you specifically is still wrong, in much the same way that DF misinterprets HL's use of the word "responsibility" in the quote. That having been said, I could have used better phrasing.

You obviously don't understand what "taking responsibility for the problem" means.

I was kind of tempted to let you have the last word since this is a ridic sideline, but if you go to the bottom of the same post, I continue to use the word "you" in a colloquial sense, and it should be clear in that later paragraph that I don't mean you, MicroRolller, but instead you as in someone who is in that situation (if it wasn't already clear before, which I think most readers will find it was). Also, I admitted that it was poor word choice, which demonstrates an acceptance of responsibiility, so the ad hominem deflection fails as well.

I know what you meant. You, and by you I mean you muppet, claim it was a poor choice of words but still don't take the blame for the miscommunication. Somehow it's my fault for not understanding what you meant to say and not what you had actually said. Maybe you don't understand what you're doing so let me try and explain it to you. RIght after you accepted responsibility you tried to deflect it. Sound familiar?

And whether you were taking about me specifically or some mythical "you" it's still stupid to make the assumption you made. Now so you don't accuse me of making more ad hominem's let me point out I called your assumption stupid.

That's the assumption that Lederer had and we've seen enough to know that just because he says something doesn't make it true. Determining the cause of the problem is an important step trying to determine how to resolve a problem. The reason that you try and find out the cause is because it makes determining the appropriate solution easier. I find it hard to believe that Lederer doesn't know who was responsible and what led to the decisions being made.

Put yourself in the shoes of one of the owners of FTP. You had millions of dollars of equity in a company that you had every indication to believe was doing well. Then over a short period of time something shady was going on that resulted in the loss of player funds and the loss of millions of dollars of future earnings and net worth. I think it would be completely reasonable to want to know why.

If someone stole your car and a week later the cops brought your car back wouldn't you want to know what happened to it?

The most unreasonable and unwise thing to do is to not know what was the cause of the problems. Let's say it was an employee of the company that did all this stuff and was funneling the money into their personal bank account? What if all the player money was just sitting in some Cayman bank and recovering would be enough to pay players back and keep the company alive? What if Bitar thought he was being slighted by the other owners and was determined to destroy the company and he did just that to spite them. Should he still have the right to vote on important decisions? What if it was just incompetence. Should his opinion still matter? He didn't want to entertain a deal by stars in the beginning and that probably delayed a deal that ultimately is getting players repaid.

I didn't jump into this discussion because of what DF said in relation to this. I jumped in because of what you said about people getting in the way by trying to find out the source of the problem

I hope she does a part 8 and discusses this thread and her interpretation of any misinterpretations it might have caused.

Hey muppet. The point is that HL knew how they got to be in such a horrible state. But if you ask him he will say "I don't know". So why would he want people to figure out what went wrong?

Yeah but what if people misinterpret her interpretation of the misinterpretations?