French businessmen Bernard Tapie and Prosper Jeremy Masqueiler have been named as directors of a new software supply company for currently inactive poker brand Full Tilt Poker, heightening speculation that an announcement on its acquisition and relaunch is imminent.
According to papers filed with the Companies Registration Office in Ireland, the new “software consultancy and supply” company was incorporated with capital of €1m in February of this year, with a name change from “New Full Tilt Limited” to “GCubed Limited” approved last Wednesday. Two newly registered companies under the name of Full Tilt Holding Ltd have also been established in Malta, spotted by a contributor to the 2+2 poker forum this morning.
With a subsidiary of Full Tilt having applied for a full online gambling licence in Alderney at the end of March and its Pocket Kings marketing and customer service arm now recruiting in Ireland, these recent developments serve to heighten speculation that French investment house Groupe Bernard Tapie’s long-mooted acquisition of FTP remains on track to complete and that formal confirmation of this is imminent.
French investment house Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT) embarked on negotiations with Full Tilt’s owners and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to acquire Full Tilt last September. Under the terms of the deal GBT has been reportedly attempting to broker, the French investment group would bear responsibility for refunding non-US players’ balances, and the DoJ for US players’.
Full Tilt Poker’s owners were seeking US$150m from investors to cover its obligations to players at the time the poker room’s operating licences were suspended by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) in June last year. The AGCC revealed at the time of formally revoking the licences in September that Full Tilt’s owners had concealed US$331m of FTP-related fund seizures by US authorities between 2007 and 2011 prior to being shutdown in the US by US federal prosecutors last April, continuing to mispresent this to the AGCC as available cash and to credit player deposits when it was no longer able to pull this money from players’ bank accounts.
The directors of GCubed Limited, Tapie and Masquelier, worked together on establishing the International Stadiums Poker Tour in 2010, with Masquelier also heading up Partouche Interactive from 2006 to 2009 before launching the French-facing poker site PokerXtrem.fr, which runs on Microgaming/888′s network.
