Excapsa to cough up in UltimateBet fiasco
Posted by admin on November 13th, 2008
Superior court orders $15 million as payout
Tuesday saw the curtain rung down on a key Ontario Superior Court judgment in a civil action relating to the UltimateBet hole card corruption disgrace that cheated 1000s of online poker players of millions of dollars with the software launched by Excapsa.
Excapsa Software Inc, based in Toronto, which has an ex-Ontario prime minister and former Royal Canadian Mounted Police chief in its board of directors, sold its possessions to ex-Mohawk grand chief Joe Norton’s Tokwiro Enterprises in 2006.
Excapsa is going through insolvency procedures and has been linked to the UltimateBet fiasco, the National Post said. Justice Sarah Pepall endorsed an arrangement by which Excapsa investors will pay fifteen million American dollars to Blast Off Limited. The firm is owned by Norton, who runs UltimateBet. Blast Off said it required the money to repay players tricked in online poker games between the years 2004 and 2008.
Rigging software reveals hidden hand
An autonomous probe set up by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission discovered credible proof of several corrupt cases on UltimateBet between May 2004 and January 2008. A means of letting insiders see their rivals’ hidden cards was incorporated into the software, the court had been told. Russell Hamilton, an ex-consultant to UltimateBet and American professional poker player, has been spotted as the key man behind the cheating episode. He has not yet been charged in the case and has not replied in public to the panel’s accusations. The site has given out six million dollars and owes another nine million dollars.
Ex-Liberal prime minister of Ontario, David Peterson, Excapsa’s non-executive chairman in 2006, said the board had no clue that the firm had engineered things to abet cheating.
The Excapsa sale resulted from a cleanup in September 2006 on online gaming by the American Congress. Blast Off then said it would pay one hundred and thirty million dollars, ten million immediately and the rest in parts before 2012. It debunked on the payments in December 2007.