Lederer Discusses Player Loans, Ivey Lawsuit

Published on September 21st, 2012 3:11 am EST

Pokernews.com continues to release half hour snippets of the interview that they conducted with Howard Lederer. Lederer and Pokernews.com sat down for a lengthy (seven hours) interview in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Six parts of the interview have now been released, with a couple more segments expected to be released later this week. Pokernews.com has uploaded the videos to Youtube - you can watch them below:

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4



Part 5



Part 6



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In parts 5 and 6 of the interview, Lederer discusses a few interesting topics, including:

Player Loans

Lederer says that David Oppenheim never repaid his loan to the company. Lederer says that Chris Ferguson lent Erick Lindgren two million dollars to give to another player, but Lindgren ended up being "double credited" for the $2 million. Lederer says that Lindgren never paid the extra $2 million back to the company.

Lederer also says that he repaid his loan to the company, but that Gus Hansen pointed out that Howard had subtracted his outstanding account balance from the amount owing, which was not fair to all of the company's customers who still were unable to access their balances. Lederer said that he repaid an additional $300k after agreeing with Hansen.

Phil Ivey Lawsuit

Lederer says that Ivey's lawsuit was self-serving and destructive, and that it did nothing to help Full Tilt's customers. Lederer says that Ivey wanted to be free to be sponsored by another poker site but also wanted to keep his shares in the company. Lederer also says that Ivey's lawsuit may have turned away potential purchasers/investors (Jack Binion was mentioned).

New Board of Directors

Lederer says that a small majority of the company's shareholders wanted to implement a new Board of Directors and new CEO. The new Board of Directors would have been comprised of Phil Ivey, Phil Gordon and Andy Bloch. This never ended up happening. Lederer says that the new BOD wanted to be paid $20k per month.

Signing Off on Pokerstars Deal

Lederer says in the video that a number of the company's shareholders, including John Juanda, didn't sign off on the Pokerstars deal. Lederer claimed in the interview that Juanda was the company's second largest shareholder, which was later refuted by Juanda.

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The general consensus is that Lederer is being shifty and deceptive in the videos, trying to his best to point the fingers of blame away from himself and onto others.

The videos, as you can imagine, have been the hot topic of conversation in the poker world over the past couple of days. The revelations about Erick Lindgren and John Juanda have particularly gotten people talking.

Speaking of Juanda, here is an interesting Tweet from him earlier tonight:

"Howard didn't mention in his interview that FTP management also stole 5.4M from my best friend@Erik_Seidel #LedererFiles"

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