I can't see how we can get our money back if their debts far exceed their bank accounts.

As an aside I thought it funny (strange) that the only person who has been found guilty and sent to prison spent a HUGE three months in jail.

Thank you for the update.

hints why their selling assests....

Ray and Coward got ~80m together. They were 330m short on BF. The owners where paid with player money. FT hasn't had it's own money since at least 2008. Every cent the company had was player money while they where short. Money doesn't become FT money because they raked it while being two to three hundred million short.

You know what pisses me off the most when i think about it.... HL is throwing a party tonight, and trust me he hears how bad ppl hate him with all they have and he is just sitting back sitting with a brew just laughing at us bc he has all of the money we put in on FTP.... so he could really careless.... its sickening

Yeah... no.

He's probably the most stressed he's been in his whole life right now. Probably cant sleep much thinking about when theyre gonna get him and what bitar's saying

Imagine all the private conversations that are no longer so private.

Unless Ray Bitar has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, has only a year to live and wants to spend as much time as possible with his mother and sister, it makes absolutely no sense for him to "voluntarily" return to the United States. I'm not a lawyer and certainly not privy to all the legal maneuvering in this case, but it just doesn't make sense that Ray would return to the United States only to be arrested, prosecuted, and sent off to do a long stretch in the pokey while Howard, "Jesus" and Rafe blissfully look on from the sidelines. Mafia members take an oath of "omerta" and usually observe their vow of silence - right until the moment they're facing the rest of their life in prison. Ray Bitar doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who willingly takes it on the chin for his buddies ... much more likely that he's cutting a deal.

If Ray Bitar's lawyer let his client walk into a trap, he's even more incompetent than Joe Amendola.

Possibilities.

1. Ray was the one in charge the whole time and was falsely assuring Howard and Chris that FTP was running smoothly. He feels bad and decided to turn himself in because of how he screwed up.

2. Ray's lawyer is an idiot and didn't foresee the sealed indictment and was just expecting Ray to make a deal with the DOJ.

3. The PS deal is finally done so Ray was just waiting until then to turn himself in.

Or not haha

Let's just say for a minute that only Ray knew ftp was broke.

It is the responsibility for someone who owns even 1% of a multi billion dollar a year (slight exaggeration) company to

Verify certain things like
Major expenses
Income
Player deposits

If I'm a shareholder of a poker site. Scratch that. If I'm a shareholder of a pokersite receiving huge dividends then I can theoretically assume expenses are in line and revenues are fine.

That leaves one thing I need to worry about, and that is what do we do with player deposits.

Let's say the shareholders didn't know what happened to player deposits for a second

Too ****ing bad. If you make 1mil a year plus from somethin, in my book, their is an obligation to know certain things.

If I own Apple, I Damn well know what is being done to protect trade secrets.
Ignorance is no excuse.

It is every shareholders responsibility to verify player deposits plain and simple.

Well they didn't really add any new charges per se, they just unsealed their amended indictment. It had new charges comparatively to the original indictment we saw, but those likely were added quite a time back when more codefendants stepped forward giving evidence of new violations.

A monkey wrench for who? The players hoping to sometime soon see PS overtake FTP and in the process get repaid -- perhaps. Certainly not a wrench in the plans of the DOJ. Once Bitar is in custody the prosecution / deal-making process can begin. I doubt they made many (enforceable) promises in getting him to come on over. I don't really see them flipping him in exchange for a deal -- I think they see him as the biggest fish in FTP, he was the CEO.

It seems as if one of the other big two is already a key witness for the DOJ, assumedly Howard. I don't see them viewing Ferguson as more of a key person than Bitar in site operations. Likely be hard to pierce the corporate veil and get to the simple owners. One wouldn't sue the investors in Enron because the people in power falsified and doctored records. Sure they made some money from their investment / affiliation, but if the grand total of their contribution was wearing a Enron hat around town...

DOJ might still get to Ferguson, don't get me wrong. But not by easing up too much on Bitar, he's the number one in their eyes, save for Isai Scheinberg.

Or

4.) Ray very much trusted Gil Coronado, the CFO. Gil Coronado may have mislead Ray and the others regarding the state of the finances. Ray turns himself in and exposes Coronado.

You guys do realize it's the 4th of July? Pretty standard to have like a barbeque or something.

maybe in the US

and maybe when youre not a fugitive from US

a fugitive?

isnt that what its called when youre facing indictment in a country youre avoiding

So when the DoJ submitted an indictment that says Ray repeatedly directed CC2 to commit fraud and that Ray prepared and reviewed internal reports showing the true state of the company as 200m short 9/2010, they are lying?

HL is in Vegas last I heard. And he isn't under indictment yet.

well, yea, his implication is obviously that thatd be untrue... likely false testimony given by cc2. of course this is ridiculous as the CFO wouldnt have done all this secretly to line the pockets of the owners, without the owners knowledge, lol.

something isnt true just because it is in an indictment; whats said in the indictment is what is to be proven in court and all that good stuff.
wow facepalm on myself, i thought he was named with Bitar originally

There you go. Something isn't true because someone is found guilty of it in court. It's either true or it isn't.

So much for theory #4.

Howard's barbeque or something:

Somehow I missed this doozie earlier.

Don't you realize that private regulation is close to an oxymoron?

Can you give us an example of private regulation over the transfer and custody of consumers' money in the billions of dollars that actually works.

Don't you realize that the regulation provided by the KGC and the AGCC is a lot closer to private regulation than the sort of government regulation we might end up seeing in the US?

lol. are you trying to claim the free market doesn't regulate industries? here is a simple one. a free market regulation of the banking industry is that #$@$@s that scam and take insane risks go broke thus giving incentive to act more cautiously. when the government 'regulates' the industry, they get bailed out and are given huge incentives to take risk in the first place. since you are probably not open minded enough to see this as a regulation, how about the vast swarms of private information provided in the consumer market to allow consumers a great deal of protection? consumer reports for cars/appliances etc? cnet and others for electronics? the list goes on and on. the people are protected by the free market better than by any government officials (well meaning or corrupted)..

with poker, are you truly naive enough to believe that a single congressman understands online poker well enough to actually write competent rules? what is more likely? that there are a secret number of online poker playing congressman who have a deep understanding of the industry or that the big corporate interests in the game (the casino industry) is going to write 'regulations' to 'protect us' but to really just give themselves a competitive advantage at the players expense. don't be naive.

You're wrong. Clearly you do not understand the concept of Limited Liability. Every corporate member of the FTP family was a limited liability corporation. Owners of such corproations, (with the possible exception, in some jurisdictions, of an individual owner who owns a majority of the corporation) have no such responsibilities, except, if they so decide, to themselves and their dependents.

Directors have that responsibility, but they owe that responsibility to the shareholders, not to the players. Directors also have certain legal resonsibilities to the state.

In your book, sure, but in law, not so. Good luck trying to hold an owner to your standards when they go beyond legal requirements.

The owners were told by Bitar and CC-1 that an amount greater than player deposits was held in company bank accounts, and those accounts could never be allowed to fall below the balance of player accounts. So an owner who tried to find out "what we do with player deposits" had an answer. Do you expect each owner to hire their own independent auditor to verify what management is directly reporting to them?

Speaking of auditors, I wonder whether anything other than Pocket Kings was ever audited. If so, how were the auditors tricked into giving a clean bill of health?

Much to the chagrin of politicians everywhere, citing one entity's failures does not inherently imply the alternative's superiority. Consumer reviews on products is a slightly different issue than regulation on very opaque and complicated financial transactions and agreements. Although I do agree with you that after all is said and done players will likely end up getting the shaft with regards to online poker. But that comes with the catch that that shaft will be a whole more pleasant and secure than the current shaft we're getting and have gotten in the unregulated market.