Quote:
Originally Posted by deemikey
I think this is the key point. Howard seems to feel that he and the other owners have paid for their errors by losing the company and their cash cow, and now that PS got the company and will be paying people back, everything should be forgiven and forgotten.
In some twisted way he's right, but as someone posted earlier, at the very least he should wait till everyone has their money again. And of course, there's no way to compensate everyone for the damage that has been done to the game and the players.
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"