Subject:Poker is reporting that the US Department of Justice and Groupe Bernard Tapie have reached an agreement regarding the sale and fate of Full Tilt Poker. According to an email from Ray Bitar, the indicted CEO says that upon a payment by the Tapie group and a commitment to assume responsibility to repay non-US players, the DOJ will reimburse US players and settle litigation with FTP-associated companies. The Tapie group will then work on becoming licensed once again by a gaming authority and eventually resume business.

Any deal still needs to be approved by 2/3 of Full Tilt ownership, expected to be a formality.

More perspective can be found at Wicked Chops Poker.

The arrest warrant in rem in the parallel civil forfeiture case (11 Civ. 2564) involving PokerStars, FullTilt, and UB is out. This is the instrumentality through which the domain names were redirected by the FBI to the notices up on the sites. The only sites affected by this are: www.pokerstars.com, www.fulltiltpoker.com, www.ub.com, www.ultimatebet.com, and www.absolutepoker.com.

The warrant directs the .com registrar (VeriSign) to direct the name servers to the addresses specified in the warrant or such other name servers or IP addresses as directed by the FBI.

These domains have been locked by the registry (and by the registrar in the case of www.ultimatebet.com – this domain remains with GoDaddy pending a final disposition of the domain seizure case in Kentucky) and now cannot be moved without a court order or the consent of the Department of Justice. I understand that the rest of the domains (save and except for www.ultimatebet.com) are registered with foreign registrars.

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The first in a four-part series about Nevada Gaming wrangling with a new era of poker regulation as Harrah’s and PokerStars fight …

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The inaugural NAPT-Venetian was by most accounts a smashing success. PokerStars announced the tournament in January, and less than six weeks later — at a time when big-money players usually would be heading to California for the WPT-Commerce — 872 entrants made it to the Venetian for a televised $5k main event in Las Vegas.

(The February event, and others from the fledgling North American Poker Tour, are currently airing on ESPN-2 and TSN, the leading sports television channel in Canada.)

But it wasn’t the field size, TV cameras, or $4.1 million prize pool that made the NAPT-Venetian special … it was that the Las Vegas tournament was “presented by PokerStars”. Dot net.

Perhaps surprisingly, because we see so much PokerStars on TV … this was the first time since the UIGEA that a licensed Nevada casino partnered with PokerStars (or any site like it) for a major open tournament.

Its success didn’t go unnoticed. And that may prove to be the problem for PokerStars and the North American Poker Tour, as the inaugural NAPT-Venetian will probably — almost certainly — be the last.

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Dude … it’s gettin’ hot here in the US … specifically in Las Vegas.

Yesterday federal authorities arrested Daniel Tzvetkoff, a 27-year-old Australian national “on charges that he assisted illegal internet gambling companies by processing approximately $500 million in transactions between U.S. gamblers and internet gambling websites and disguising the transactions to the banks so that they would appear unrelated to gambling,” according to a statement from the DOJ’s Southern District of New York.

Illegal internet gambling companies? Yikes …

Tzvetkoff, as founder of Intabill and ACH System, faces up to 75 years in prison for bank fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to operate and finance an illegal gambling business, and … get this … for processing fund transfers in violation of the UIGEA.

I’m pretty sure that’s the first ever indictment to bring up UIGEA charges.

About a year ago the Australia Courier-Mail reported that Tzvetkoff owed Full Tilt, PokerStars, Ultimate Bet, and Absolute Poker more than $30 million as the overextended, ostentatious Gen-Y tycoon’s personal empire was crumbling. Then, Full Tilt (through Kolyma Corporation) sued Tzvetkoff in Australian Court, saying his company Intabill owed them $52 million.

Before his arrest, he was saying Full Tilt tricked him into a bad deal and his lawyer doublecrossed him. He blamed the economy for a multi-multi-millionaire having to declare bankruptcy earlier this year. More on the pre-arrest rise and fall of an online poker payment processor here.

I mean for chrissakes, he drove a Lamborghini with the license plate “BALLER”! And when a bank repossessed a competitive race car of his, they got everything except its $100k engine, which had been stripped out and hidden.

Click below for the official word from the DOJ:

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A cover story in the latest issue of Forbes magazine (the main story asking if Al Qaeda is bankrupt) features an article discussing the US government’s possible crackdown on online poker with the impending June 1 deadline for the UIGEA to be enforced. The article can be found on their website here and includes a slide show of the big names behind online poker.

More of the court documents that were heavily redacted now have a bit less of a black line through them, to show Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars mentioned in the case of Douglas Rennick and the freezing of nearly $40m in funds from payment processors.

iMEGA has a copy of the documents up on their site.

From the Department of Justice:

Internet Gambling Payment Processor Charged With Bank Fraud, Money Laundering and Illegal Gambling Offenses

NEW YORK, Aug. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Lev L. Dassin, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Joseph M. Demarest, Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), announced today the filing of an indictment charging Douglas Rennick with bank fraud and other offenses stemming from his role in processing more than $350 million for Internet gambling companies. According to the indictment filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court:

Since at least 2007 through June 2009, Rennick opened a number of bank accounts in the United States under various corporate names, such as KJB Financial Corporation, Account Services Corporation and Check Payment Financial Co. In opening the accounts, he and his co-conspirators falsely represented that the accounts would be used for such purposes as issuing rebate checks, refund checks, sponsorship checks, affiliate checks and minor payroll processing. In fact, Rennick and his co-conspirators used the
accounts to receive funds from offshore Internet gambling companies that offered, variously, poker, blackjack, slots and other casino games. Rennick and his co-conspirators then disbursed those funds via checks to U.S. residents seeking to cash out their gambling winnings. Rennick and his co-conspirators provided false and misleading information to U.S. banks about the purpose of the accounts because the banks would not have processed the transactions had they known they were gambling-related. In
total, Rennick and his co-conspirators processed more than $350 million transferred from a Cyprus bank account to various U.S. bank accounts for this purpose.

Rennick is charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to engage in money laundering and conspiracy to operate an illegal gambling business. If found guilty, Rennick faces a maximum term of 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine on the bank fraud charge, 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine on the money laundering charge, and five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the gambling charge. The indictment also seeks the forfeiture of at least approximately
$565,908,288, which represents the amount of proceeds obtained as a result of the illegal gambling and bank fraud conspiracies. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein.

Rennick, 34, currently resides in Canada. Mr. Dassin praised the investigative work of the FBI and thanked the
Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Internal Revenue Service for their assistance in the investigation. Mr. Dassin added that the investigation is continuing.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Arlo Devlin-Brown and Jonathan New are in charge of the prosecution, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Alberts is in charge of the forfeiture in this case.

The charges contained in the indictment are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.