Hi mac72,
Lisa's asked me to ask you to stop referring to her as the "missus". It's demeaning and pretty sexist. She is masters degree educated, not some 1950's housewife. It's one thing for someone who has a significant familiarity with a person to use that type of pejorative term in a fond fashion. It's entirely different used in the patronising manner you have engaged. She was going to post herself, but it'd come from the same IP so it'd just end up looking like me running other accounts.
I don't consider it unfortunate that you don't believe me. I never expected you to. You have a clear position and agenda. Despite literally being a response to you, my reply was really intended for everyone else. You're clearly quite emotionally evoked by this issue and that's coming through strongly in your posts that are coming over more and more as a personal attacks. Trying to reason with someone who's choosing their actions based on emotion never produces any positive results.
We've gone from you attacking us for making claims you don't feel we have sound ground for to you attacking us with claims that you've no grounds for. You see a double standard there? If you have some evidence of wrongdoing, please, lay it out for everyone. We're (and I do speak for both myself and Lisa in this respect) comfortable with our company structure and the motivations behind it whether you are or not. The Directorship gives Lisa certain rights and controls that a shareholder alone (to my knowledge - and I'll admit company structuring at this level isn't one of my areas of expertise) doesn't have.
As far as the Maltese Holding company goes - that's easy and I've actually discussed this with any number of people here. We couldn't get a business bank account in the UK when we incorporated (a jump I made before understanding that requirement). Banks in the UK are pretty reluctant to engage with anything in the gambling sector. A friend in the business set us up with a company in Malta that felt they could get us the necessary account, but we had to move the business to Malta. We got over there and when the first quarter's accounts were done I became aware of accounting practices that I was very uncomfortable with (in my uninformed opinion they skated very close to tax avoidance though they are apparently very common in Malta). As such we looked to move the company back. It's taken a lot of time and money but we did eventually get a business bank account open in the UK. As such we've moved back to the UK and have removed the Maltese holding company, which would be closed by this point if we didn't have funds trapped in Malta due to the Satabank issue. As soon as that issue is resolve there will only be a UK company.
As to us not being "impressive" financially by your standards, we've never made any grandiose claims about generating huge revenues. In fact we're a mid-level affiliate at best and we consistently handicap ourselves by refusing to work with huge sections of the market that hold problematic terms or practices. Would we like to be bigger? Of course, but not at the expense of sacrificing standards. I'd rather grow slowly and feel comfortable with the approach we've taken than gain increased growth at the expense of our reputation.
So let's move on - the Deposit Guarantee. I'd suggest you may want to read the terms of the seal. The answer to your question is clearly covered there. It has an upper cap of £5k. That was specifically set to account for our financial means. Regardless though, part of how the seal works is that we're careful about who we give it to. We won't give it to operators we do not trust. Because we are careful about who we issue it to we've only actually had a single instance where we had to pay out and that was against 18Bet and for a few hundred pounds when they enforced a vague 'system betting' term. The truth is that we have actually offered this kind of payout far more often against operators who didn't hold our seal and for far larger sums, some ranging up to mid-5 figures. This has been used as leverage where operators have tried to strong arm players, demanding that they get complaints removed before they'll be paid anything. We have never had to pay out in these circumstances, but had we it would have been an installment based approach as we could not cover a mid-5 figure sum immediately. And there have been other cases where we just felt that the player had slipped through the cracks - i.e. the operator weren't really in the wrong, but the player still have been caught up in a technicality - and as such paid them ourselves. Here's an example -
With respect to BETAT/Vulkan, your account is a little off. The company ownership says that MaxEnt now owns VulkanBet. They've not contested that. We can show that previously VulkanBet was running on 'V' branded affiliate program that only represented a single other Vulkan branded property that was hooked up to one of the servers being used to distribute stolen games. I have my own opinions on what may be going on behind the scenes here, but any public position we've taken is based on this connection. The bad Vulkan properties are being operated out of Ukraine. MaxEnt now own a Vulkan property that has shared an affiliate program with one of the bad Vulkan properties. The new MaxEnt owners are based in Ukraine. These are things we can demonstrate. Beyond that, who owns what isn't for me to say. I'm saying that these facts are enough that I don't think players should engage with this group as they are a significant concern to me.
The truth of this matter is you're doing the company you're trying to protect a disservice at this point. We were happy enough to let this issue rest where it was left before xmas, awaiting the response from MaxEnt's legal representatives if there was going to be any. By kicking this all up again, you actually just draw more attention to it, something that the operator probably doesn't want by this point.
I'm not actually sure why you're asking these questions given that you've been on our Companies House page. A bit redundant. Anyway:
i) You're absolutely right - we'll be launching a new design shortly and I'll ensure it's included in the footer information of our site.
ii & iii) There's a PO Box address on the Companies House page (and on the contact us page of the site) - that's allowed by UK regulations if your domestic residence is your registered office. As I mentioned above - mid-level affiliates. We deal with a variety of people in varying emotional states. In my opinion, having our domestic residence on a public register is a potential physical risk. We semi-regularly receive threats from complainants we haven't supported. It's a fact of life in this particular job.
I'm not going to respond to you further. I'm sure you'll have strong views on the why of that, but I don't think this conversation is really this is doing anyone any good and is simply fuelling further conflict. If anyone else here has questions about how we run our business, feel free to drop me a PM and I'll be happy to share.
TP
But you'd still have been better having only 1 of you in the company and the other out. Even on 50/50 ownership only 50% would ever be in play, the way you have it now your allin.
