play, poker champions Christopher Ferguson and Howard Lederer.ĭikshit’s fellow PartyGaming cofounders, Ruth Parasol DeLeon and Russell DeLeon, who live in Europe, neither have settled with the feds nor have they been charged. Some of the most prominent are not even offshore, like the men widely believed to be behind Full Tilt Poker, the second-biggest company servicing U.S. It certainly would have been strange for Dikshit to wind up in jail even as other online poker entrepreneurs were not being prosecuted. “He wanted to square his accounts with the U.S.” “The acceptance of responsibility is extraordinary,” said Pomerantz. Indeed, even Mark Pomerantz, Dikshit’s lawyer, said during the hearing that he and his colleagues had discussed the confusing circumstances surrounding the case “hundreds of times.” In arguing for no jail time, Pomerantz highlighted Dikshit’s $300 million payment and said Dikshit, who is a citizen of India with no ties to the U.S., had originally been told by some lawyers that it was unlikely he would be charged, and even if he was charged the chances of extradition were slim. “It has been two years and there are reasons.”

“There are challenges in this prosecution,” said Devlin-Brown, adding that Dikshit had asked to settle the case at its very early stages. Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown said that the investigation that involved Dikshit remains ongoing, pointing to sealed papers the government filed with the court. “It has been two years since this defendant began cooperating, what’s going on?”Īssistant U.S. “Nobody else has been indicted,” said Judge Rakoff. To some it seemed like the Justice Department had drawn a line in the sand against online poker and set a two-year time frame to go after industry players.Īt Thursday’s hearing Judge Rakoff challenged a government prosecutor wondering why there have been no other prosecutions, specifically mentioning Dikshit’s fellow PartyGaming cofounders, Americans Ruth Parasol DeLeon and her husband Russell DeLeon. A few months after Dikshit pleaded guilty, his former company, PartyGaming, a Gibraltar company that was once the world’s biggest online gaming company, struck a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, admitting that its U.S.

Ruth parasol forbes