Up to 600 jobs at risk as poker firm licence withdrawn

BETWEEN 500 and 600 jobs are in jeopardy at Irish subsidiaries of online poker business, Full Tilt, after its Channel Island regulator withdrew the group’s licences yesterday, in effect banning it from continuing to trade.

The Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC), which licensed and regulated Full Tilt, withdrew the group’s permits yesterday after a finding it “fundamentally misled” the regulator about its financial position.

At a six-day hearing in London, it emerged that Full Tilt had wrongly claimed to the commission that money that had been seized by the US authorities was still on its balance sheet and available to the group, when in fact, it was not.

“Serious breaches of AGCC regulations include false reporting, unauthorised provision of credit, and failure to report material events,” André Wilsenach, the commission’s executive director, said in a statement yesterday.

Full Tilt employs between 500 and 600 people in Dublin through two subsidiaries – Pocket Kings Ltd and Pocket Kings Consulting Ltd – which provide software, IT, management and customer support services to the group.

Those jobs are now under threat as Full Tilt cannot continue trading without its licences. Mr Wilsenach’s statement indicated that the licences could only be restored if the business was sold or transferred to new owners.

Pocket Kings told workers earlier this month that it would be seeking up to 250 redundancies from its Dublin base.

It blamed the fact that Alderney had temporarily suspended its licences on June 29th.

This week’s hearing in London was designed to determine whether the permits should be withdrawn altogether or restored to the group.

Pocket Kings London-based spokespersons were asked for a comment yesterday, but did not respond.

The regulator suspended Full Tilt’s licences following the news that the US department of justice filed a series of money-laundering and bank fraud charges against the group in April.

US attorney Preet Bharara last week followed this up with a claim that Full Tilt used $440 million in players’ funds to pay various sums to directors Raymond Bitar, Howard Lederer, Christopher Ferguson and Rafael Furst.

The AGCC was made aware of the new charges after they were made last week, but its executive decided that they were not relevant to the licensing hearing.

Pocket Kings Ltd and Pocket Kings Consulting Ltd are included in the list of defendants on the formal complaint filed by Mr Bharara with a New York court last week.

In those charges, the attorney claims that Full Tilt was not a “legitimate poker company, but a global Ponzi scheme” that cheated its own players and misled them about the safety of the funds that they had deposited with the company.

His claim states that despite Full Tilt’s written assurances to all players that the money in their accounts was segregated from the company’s own operational accounts, this was not the case.