Back and forth finger pointing, I don’t know’s, and excuses amongst FTP Team
If there’s been one thing for sure as a result of recent published interviews featuring Full Tilt owners Andy Bloch and Howard Lederer, it’s that the in-fighting among the powers that were behind the company is slowly being exposed. The Bitar-Ferguson-Lederer core that controlled the company might not have owned 51%, but they clearly owned enough (between 35 and 40%) to be able to put down all but the most serious challenges from other owners.
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Among the more interesting tidbits to have leaked out in recent weeks are that degen gambler and FT owner Erick Lindgren was accidentally double-paid a $2 million loan / transfer and would never repay the accidental overage, which seems to correlate with the other severe gambling problems of Lindgren’s that have been exposed in recent months.
Then there’s the tale of Erik Seidel somehow having $5.4 million stolen by Full Tilt, as mentioned by John Juanda on his @LuckBoxJuanda Twitter account. Juanda, who reportedly had a significant tiff with Lederer and Bitar years ago has taken issue with a lot of the claims offered by Lederer.
Here’s a sampling of Juanda tweets after the release of “The Lederer Files”. Starting on September 20th, here’s what Juanda wrote:
I think @pokernews did good job asking so many tough questions, but HL got away from most by simply saying I DON’T KNOW#LedererFiles
For the record, Howard Lederer was wrong when he said I was 2nd largest shareholder of FTP! Maybe he REALLY didn’t know!!???#LedererFiles
As Ray Bitar’s boss, Howard Lederer should’ve accepted more blames instead of trying to shift blames to everyone else.#LedererFiles
I owe FTP $256K, was offered to settle for 80% but declined when I found out Ray, w/boards’ approval,was still taking home 200K+/mo post BF
Instead I offered to pay 100% as soon as I could be certain it’d go toward paying players NOT management salary&lawyers fees#LedererFiles
Howard didn’t mention in his interview that FTP management also stole 5.4M from my best friend@Erik_Seidel #LedererFiles
What would u do in my shoes? Send check to same ppl who just stole from ur buddy?Or wait+hope to pay to the right parties?#LedererFiles
When I said ‘right parties’ I didn’t mean @Erik_Seidel bcos he shouldn’t have priority over the players but he should prolly be next in line
IMO Lederer didn’t do interview bcos he’s sorry. He did it2 settle old scores+put blame on ppl who disagreed w/how he ran FTP#LedererFiles
Oddly enough, Tom “durrrr” Dwan, who stepped into the Full Tilt picture very late and was probably not privy to much of the internal politics and mismanagement that brought the company down, checked in more on Lederer’s side in his own recent tweets. Here’s a Durrrr sampler from recent days:
Just watched the last of the lederer files and then read andybloch’s interview. I’m pretty confident the majority of what they said is true
I knew a bit of stuff independently and what they said mainly lined up with that (although I thought howard emphasized wrong a few times)
However the big gripe I have is both of them not realising how big of a mistake it was for ftp to accept deposits after april 15th
Also I think I have some obligation as a person/known poker player to when possible help people avoid being taken advantage of- and I messed
Up some by not trying to make more sure that ftp had the players $$. I think the owners owed this to the players more than I did obviously
Which makes it a bit extra ridiculous (although still understandable to me and definitely possible I wouldve made the same mistake) that so
Few owners were willing to step up and take board seats to provide oversight….. Sorry for all the tweets- this seemed the right place
Lol @johnjuanda cmon. Some of what howard said wasn’t exact but seemed like he tried to be accurate. He didn’t guess enough, and andy seemed
Pretty on point. Both of them were way off on thinking ftp taking deposits post black friday was acceptable. Rest wasn’t too bad imo.
Today’s news on the Full Tilt front is the publication by 2+2′s Pokercast of its own followup with Lederer, which features Howard continuing the same spin he started in the PN video. Here’s a shortcut to that interview, with the actual Lederer stuff starting at about 17:00.
Will Juanda or Seidel or one of the Tilt Boys, the Full Tilt owners who seem to have been more on the outside looking in, step forward to do their own complete interview to refute the worst of Lederer’s nonsense? We can all hope.
