Agree with you on this one. I don't think any legitimate salaries will be subject to clawback.

More on point would be Scott Rothstein's Ponzi scheme in South Florida. Clawback was applied to everyone that benefitted in any way from his business,political and charity dealings. Would be interesting to see if this would apply to Full Tilt and all their Pros,Directors and the PPA

Shareholders=owners
Owners=criminals
Shareholders=criminals

As far as the employees ... They are not allowed to recieve stolen money.

Imagine the bank being tricked into loaning someone a billion dollars... That someone opens a company and hires his buddies paying them all of the billion ASAP...

Do the buddies get to keep the money?

Of course not

I'm going to agree that there are differences between shareholders who buy shares in a secondary market and one of 10-20 people who funded and started a LLC togeter. But are those differences relevent to the issue of whether they have to pay back improper distributions? Which of these differences do you think makes a legal difference as to liability to return improper distributions received? Cite your reasons, with legal references.

I'm going to guess that if something significant happens, there will be a new thread.

I think there's less than a 5% chance

I do think it is more like Madoff and that there is a chance of a clawback of distributions for similar reasons to the clawbacks of Madoff payouts.

The problem for poker players is that many of the people who are suffering clawbacks in the Madoff case are more analogous to FTP players who have cashed out winnings than they are to FTP shareholders. In a ponzi scheme, the fraudster pays a profit to early customer depositors using the deposits of later customer depositors, usually after having skimmed the deposits for himself. The difference that might save winning players from clawbacks is that ponzi winners didn't earn their winnings, while there is an argument that winning poker players did. A tricky legal point will be whether FTP ever had a legal debt to a player that was larger than (net deposits - rake paid).

I find it interesting this is the issue that draws you continually out of the shadows. More sickening than interesting actually. But alas, I'll let you get back to trolling another innocent victim of this with requests for well researched legal arguments. Perhaps it would be more interesting for you to do the research and build a class for the players to get their money returned. That way you can experience what it is like not to be the contrarian who constantly defends scumbags.

Could you elaborate on this please? Why would a Bitar conviction necessarily pierce the corporate veil, and why would piercing the corporate veil necessarily make all the shareholders liable if the Directors who authorized the distribtutions are able to cover the liability to players? (I can understand why piercing the corporate veil could be bad news for Ferguson and Lederer in particular.)

K you obviously aren't getting the point of my obviously exaggerated example. If every investor, part owner were held accountable of the very few who took part in a corp scandal to pay out the many defrauded, things would be very different in the world for every corp scandal we've seen in history. That's not the way the world works and thinking anything less is flaunting stupidity and naivete.

My wife and I were victim of a corp scandal where the CFO/CEO were the only ones heading up cooking the books. Zero board members knew, along with the many other investors/employees in the company who were defrauded. Over 200 victims, including us, were left with nothing one dark shining moment when the board finally found out after a small piece of evidence was brought to light. The take away msg here is who knew what when.

And mind you, I have probably more tied up with FTP than anyone currently replying in this thread. I'd love to point fingers at anyone I think I could get money out of (so I want to be on your side of the argument). Arguments that have been made of pointing fingers at whoever they can, make me want to vomit and further degrade the quality of this thread.

P.S. If anyone here says OH HOW MUCH... GFFYS and search my posts if you want to get a roundabout idea.

Yes

No evidence and no charges. Hence, no.

No.

Probably wrong.

Were the buddies unaware about tricking the bank? Did the buddies perform work of value commensurate with payment? If the answers are both "yes", then they probably get to keep the money.

An important difference between Madoff "investors " who are being hit with clawbacks, and your hypothetical buddies is that the buddies may have earned their pay, while the Madoff investors did not.

As to how an employee could possibly be allowed to keep money when he was paid with stolen funds (that he didn't know were stolen), research some of the legal effects of the fungibility of money.

Because a pattern of Wire Fraud as alleged in the indictment is a RICO predicate, once proven, the 'corporation' is an organized criminal enterprise, every deposit taken from the victims would be considered dirty, regardless of the status of the person receiving the fictional profit.

I seriously doubt they will actually be able to get wire fraud conviction though, asset wise the re-sale value of the company was likely higher than their debt long after they ceased accepting deposits in the US.

Breaking AGCC rules about keeping cash on hand isn't fraud, and lying about what they were doing with the deposits might only rise to breach of contract.

It is only one of several issues, mis-statements, misconceptions and errors which induces me to post in this thread.

Explaining that someone is not legally liable for something given the state of the available evidence is not defending anybody.

I see you are not up to the challenge. Unfortunate, your talents for sly condensation and unclothe arrogance would be so much more amusing in the service of a just cause.

If this is correct, then it would seem that any ponzie scheme orchestrated by a group of two or more people with more than two victims would be a RICO predicate offence.

I find it easier to believe that they will get the wire fraud convictions than I do to believe they will bring RICO charges if the Wire fraud charges succeed. I can't coherently defend those beliefs though.

Why not? They gained something of value (a continuing licence) by knowing misrepresentation with intent. Not fraud in the US, certainly, though.

Even if it is proved they lied in order to induce other deposits and/or discourage withdrawls?

There is not enough reliable, credible evidence to know under what, if any, theory of law some class, or classes, of persons may be held liable for some, or all, of the losses suffered by the players. Until some real details are developed about who did what and who knew what and when, all discussion of this is speculation. This is not a criticism, I find it interesting (well, some of it) to read, but the certainty with which some posts approach the subject is not warranted.

Additionally, we don't know what law will be applied to that evidence; and it is possible that different theories of recovery might cause the law of different jurisdictions to be applied to the same evidence. For example, the jurisdiction of the law determining the disposition of improper distributions (if there were any) is likely to be a different jurisdiction from the law looking at a RICO type violation and so on for each different possible legal theory of recovery. For the most part these choice of law issues may be agreed upon by the parties or decided by the court; but we don't know what those decisions will be.

It is good to consider these things. The way to do it may be to imagine several most probable factual scenarios and then apply the law of the most probably jurisdictional choices to them. At best you come up with a multitude of possible results. For certain, the lawyers involved are trying to consider all the different fact patterns that may develop and the choice of law issues and how they may play out. If this matter goes to through the litigation process the lawyers will learn most of the operative facts in discovery though each side will view them differently.

Most likely, it will get settled and few, if any, of these issues will ever have a final determination but part of the reason it will settle is because the upside and downside of possible different results have been considered.

I came here for the RaptorJesus

Aggo and co... Your vid is strangely comforting to me

Cant read page 339...

Oyeah what was the name of that documentary? I forgot

Hey guys, I've been following this thread from day 1 but I've not caught up with it since the supposed pokerstars deal. Is there any positive news at all? Seems like the last 4-5 pages consists of posters debating law.

In b4 next week.

wow, of course they have to make something up, otherwise the DOJ would have ruined TWO industries... now they bankrupped the lobster industry

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...951019546.html


i think this is an indication that, in fact, ray maybe was working alone, otherwise his accomplices would hold up lobster prices right now...

OR

This is how they got Ray to voluntarily go to jail... lobster will soon be so cheap that it will be the prison food of choice...

I guess if you haven't seen this, you should, though I'm not sure why; it would have been a lot better if he hadn't gone to "blah, blah, blah."

http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-blog...s-major-hurdle

A true ponzi scheme, unless only one person in the organization is aware that it's a ponzi scheme, is by definition an organized crime, RICO statutes are almost always used.

IF they prove the Wire Fraud, they would be daft not to use the RICO statutes to recover the money, the whole point of the ponzi allegation seemed geared towards recovering the money.

It's a criminal charge, defendants occasionally get off on technicalities, but only rarely get convicted on them, something like maintaining their license long enough to secure a purchaser to bail them out isn't likely to stick.

There has to be mens rea, even after BF it's an easy argument to say the lies were stupid and wrong, but the intention to maintain the assets (which they had surreptitiously "sold" already to the players).

Then there is the question of jurisdiction, their business contacts with the US were cut off on BF, so whether or not taking deposits with only $5M on hand may not be admissible.

-----

Bitar probably truly believed that the company was worth at least $1B, they thought they had a valid patent on fast-fold poker, they thought regulation and IPO were right around the corner.

"What's wrong with having $390M in debt and only $60M on hand?" He likely wondered, and "Why take out credit from a bank when we can borrow player money?" and rationalized "We're doing the players a favor, if we keep the cash on hand the DOJ might grab it".

okay, it's pure speculation, BUT:

North Korea said Wednesday it was to make "an important announcement" at noon. - source http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/nort...03800315F.HTML - one time


but to be serious, w/ the 'Kentucky Thing' cleared (e.g. http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-and-re...-states-claim/), i'm really optimistic about the progress

DFYP