Quote:
Originally Posted by barryg1
“The consensus in the poker community is that all money owed to Full Tilt or taken by investors after the company became insolvent should be used to pay back player’s funds. If I were to make a deal with you it would look like I had turned my back on the best interests of the American players.”
This reasoning is iffy; if the DoJ were asking for the $400k, which would presumably go to paying back US deposits, you could use the same line and say you can't play ball because you'd be turning your back on RoW players. Assuming player deposits owed are roughly 50% US and 50% RoW, how about paying half to Tapie now, and putting the other half in escrow for US players as has been suggested?
The morality of these borrowers' actions comes down to what they knew and when, which I doubt we'll ever know. Yes, FTP was probably solvent when Barry got his 400k, but between then and last March FTP transitioned to insolvency. Along the way, it's possible that the big pros were blissfully ignorant about this transition, but it's also possible they had some inkling that times were tough, and were encouraged by cash-strapped FTP management to settle up. If Barry and the other pros did have this info and made no effort to settle their debts before Black Friday, or, worse, knew FTP might go broke and saw this as a chance to freeroll by borrowing more from FTP (looks like Barry didn't do this but the other pros, who knows), well that's pretty awful.