Quote:
Originally Posted by ZeeJustin
Possibly a stupid question but:
The latest Subject Poker article technically doesn't mention an agreement of sale of FTP to GBT.
Obviously it mentions asset transfers, so should I be assuming the sale agreement has been signed already?
I'm assuming the acquisition agreement from weeks ago basically locked FTP into a sale pending the GBT : DoJ agreement that has now already happened, therefore FTP signing the terms of sale was a foregone conclusion and didn't make an SP headline. Is that accurate?
You've got things a little mixed up. There is no direct sale between FTP and GBT. The intended transaction is this:
1) FTP forfeits its assets to DoJ.
2) DoJ sells those assets to GBT.
In other words, DOJ acts as a middleman. That's important legally and stuff.
The acquisition agreement from a few weeks ago was an agreement between DOJ and GBT effectively in which DOJ said that they would sell various FTP assets to GBT if it got them and GBT agreed to buy them. This is obviously a necessary step because it provides FTP's incentive to accept the forfeiture, DOJ's incentive to settle the civil complaint (with the companies, not the people, and not the criminal complaint), and GBT's incentive to keep dealing with all this crap. It also contains the very important division of the player liability between DOJ and GBT.
Today's agreement is between FTP and GBT. FTP is promising to forfeit its assets to DOJ and making various assurances to GBT about what those assets contain, etc etc. I've not read the agreement, so I don't quite know what GBT is promising. The really important thing here is that FTP's ownership has agreed to give up these assets. That's obviously huge.
The next step is basically for this stuff to, like, actually happen. As I understand it, that means somebody with authority to represent FTP showing up in a court room with various Assistant US Attorneys from SDNY and presenting the judge with documentation showing that FTP has agreed to forfeit its assets under whatever terms and the Assistant US Attorneys agreeing to it. Then, DOJ would presumably turn around and sell the assets to GBT. (Hopefully that two-step process will effectively be one step since it's all been laid out already, but who knows.)
One of the slow points here might be the fact that I think they need a judge and a courtroom, and those are notoriously difficult commodities to get on short notice, especially right before Christmas/New Years. GBT certainly wants it done ASAP, and I think that the other two parties are pretty frustrated with how long it's been taking as well, so hopefully they'll be able to do this quickly.
Then, of course, we've got GBT owning a defunct poker website without licensing and a huge player liability AND DOJ owning a huge player liability as well, and we go from there. I don't know if either party has worked out the logistics of repaying people, but both of them seem to be acting in good faith in that regard.
Last edited by NoahSD; 12-15-2011 at 03:41 PM.