Home / Poker News September 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – Lederer Continues Interview-spree
The Poker Grapevine – Lederer Continues Interview-spree
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2012-09-28 09:30
Howard Lederer has been silent on the Full Tilt Poker issue for 15 months and that silence did little to help his image within the poker community. To make a long story short, most view him as responsible for most of Full Tilt’s problems and for the eventual post-Black Friday meltdown too, directing all their anger at him and making him a poster-child of greed and ruthlessness masquerading as an innocent ‘poker professor’. In light of the new information shared by Lederer through his recent interviews though, cracks may start to appear in that theory, as the truly intricate nature of the mix-up slowly surfaces.
After the “Lederer Files”, Lederer joined the webcast of a
popular poker forum to answer questions covering a wide range of issues the other day.
The 4-hour long phone interview had Lederer discuss the role of the 4-member board of directors and that of CFO Gil Coronado in the eventual demise of the operation. Lederer also discussed the owner distributions, which continued after it had become obvious that there was a nine-figure backlog that had piled up.
Lederer made it clear that following Black Friday, none of the owners, including himself returned any money to the company, with the exception of Chris Ferguson, who lent $14 million to the operation.
According to Lederer, Full Tilt officials found themselves unable to get their members to return the loans, thus recovering distributions would not even be seriously considered.
Although he said he had considered repaying some of his dividends, he couldn’t get any cash and found it impossible to liquidate any of his assets.
In other news: London has hosted a £10k High Roller event this week at a private club, a tournament which drew several high profile professionals despite the utter lack of media spotlight. 20 players paid up the buy-in, among them Sam Trickett, Phil Ivey and Erik Seidel. The winner of the event was Paul Phua, who collected £1 million for his efforts.
Terje Augdal was the last in-the-money finisher, picking up £200k for his 4th place.
