Reason #785,147 why Anurag Dikshit is a better person than the Entities: We'd have donated £500m to more or less buying Freida Pinto.
The unfortunately named
Anurag Dikshit (pronounced DICK-SHIT) has sold his remaining stake in
PartyGaming (38.8M shares) for £105m (approximately $170M USD).
Dikshit will donate the monies to his charitable organization, the Kusuma Trust. Apparently he doesn’t give a crap about Haiti.
We kid, we kid.
Dikshit in total has made £700m from his shares, of which he’s reportedly funneled £500m to his charity.
In related news, Party is rumored to be near a deal to merge with Bwin. Read more here and more on Dikshit here.
Sadly, this will likely be our last ever Anurag Dikshit post. Godspeed, Mr. Dikshit.
Dikshit.
Dikshit.
Tagged as: Anurag Dikshit, PartyGaming
The World Poker Tour accepting PartyGaming's buyout bid was about as shocking as Vikki Blows looking good naked. And hey, look at that! New Vikki Blows naked pics linked at the end of the post!
In pretty unshocking news,
World Poker Tour shareholders approved a buyout from
Peerless Media, Ltd (i.e.
PartyGaming).
No real shocker there, despite the unexpected curveball thrown by Mandalay Media last week.
From what we’ve heard, the Party deal has huge upside for the WPT with long-term yearly annuity from gaming revenues. It was really a no-brainer of a deal.
Read the WPT’s announcement in full here.
In equally unshocking news, Vikki Blows looks good naked here (obviously NSFW).
Tagged as: featured, Online Poker, PartyGaming, World Poker Tour
Mandalay Media may have some ideas on how to spice up WPT broadcasts...
Mandalay Media, a company best known for producing films like Sleepy Hallow, Donnie Brasco, and Wild Things (above), has announced a proposal to purchase the World Poker Tour for $35M in cash and stock.
According to the bulletin:
“Shareholders would receive cash and stock of $1.69 per share, based on WPT`s recent outstanding shares and disregarding options. The proposal represents a premium of approximately 54% over the closing price of WPT`s common stock on October 26, 2009 and a premium of approximately 23% over the implied value at closing of WPT`s pending asset sale with Peerless Media Ltd.”
Damn. That’s a quick turnaround for a company many felt was running on fumes a year ago. Hats off to Lipscomb and crew.
How would the WPT fit into Mandalay’s overall business strategy? Tough to say, but according to Mandalay’s website their “mission is to build a strategic combination of new media infrastructure, distribution, and digital content companies. It intends to achieve its growth objectives organically and through asset acquisition, merger, exchange of capital stock, or other business combinations with domestic or foreign businesses.”
So yeah, not sure. But they probably have a plan.
Read the full bulletin here. We reached out to WPT for a quote so hopefully will have one soon.
MORNING UPDATE: We know WPT is working on a comment, but nothing yet.
MORNING UPDATE II: Mandalay has now increased their offer by $1.5M to a total of $36.5M, for a price of $1.77 per share. Read here. As Pokerati noted, a vote was scheduled today by the WPT PTB for the offer by Peerless Media (i.e. PartyGaming). Good times.
AFTERNOON UPDATE: No comment from the WPT. Can’t due to SEC rules. In not really related news, the SEC fucking rules. They should just drop Mississippi State and Vandy, add USC and Texas, and make that the like, “college football” division.
Tagged as: Mandalay Media, PartyGaming, Peerless Media, World Poker Tour
There are many things we'd buy with $750M, like, say, um, a Coca~Cola.
The unfortunately named Anurag Dikshit is selling a huge remaining stake of his shares in PartyGaming.
But here’s the kicker: he’s not selling them to buy a yacht, or a NFL franchise, or a new wife, or even a spacecraft like device that his six year-old son named Falcon could then let off into the atmosphere with initial media reports claiming he was on the craft and fell to the ground but then it turns out he was just hiding in the attic and then turns out it was all just a hoax.
No, Dikshit is cashing out 66% of his total remaining shares, reducing his total stake from 28% to 9.5%, at an estimate value of $350M, and is giving all of the proceeds from this sale to charity.
And no, Charity isn’t his stripper girlfriend’s name either.*
Now you may recall last December when Dikshit paid the U.S. American government $350M to basically leave him the fuck alone and not prosecute him for developing the PartyPoker gaming software. Now he’s giving another estimated $350M away from this stock sale to the Kusuma Trust, an organization he started which “provides welfare support and educational opportunities to at-risk children in Gibraltar, India and the U.K.”
So apparently Dikshit is just giving buckets of $350M away. That’s $700M he’s just given away, “here, take it, don’t want, all yours,” in less than a year.
Even more mind-blowing is Dikshit is planning on selling his remaining 9.5% in the coming months and giving that to charity as well.
Man. Some people.
For an idea of what we would use $700M on, view this this this this this this this and this. And we’d still have about $708,340,020 or so left to spare.
Read more about this mind-boggling giving-money-to-charity-thing here. Thanks to Kid Dynamite for the link.
* Rehashed joke many times over but we have lots of new readers.
Tagged as: Anurag Dikshit, featured, PartyGaming, partypoker
Anurag Dikshit, the billionaire Indian born co-founder and 27% owner of
PartyGaming, the company behind
Party Poker, has buckled under pressure from the US Department of Justice and agreed to plead guilty today in a New York court to online betting under the Wire
Act. He'll pay a $300 million settlement to the U.S. government, and because no plea deal was cut, A. Dikshit could still face a jail sentence, although that is unlikely as A. Dikshit has agreed to cooperate with US authorities in their ongoing investigation against owners of Internet gambling sites.
Many see A. Dikshit's settlement as throwing online poker under the bus as he hands the DoJ its first victory against the owner of an online poker site when, in our expert legal analysis of the matter, they'd likely fail if the case went to trial under the Wire Act.
The squeaky clean Dikshit, at least compared to his PartyGaming porn biz partner Ruth Parasol, who is not settling with the US, is seen as caving in to the pressure from the DoJ the past two years because of constant fear of prosecution and to put his US woes behind him. And because he can afford it. The 300 mil is just a drop in the bucket to A. Dikshit, whose net worth is estimated in the $3 billion range.
Following in his footsteps is PartyGaming itself, which is in discussions right now with the DoJ. According to a PartyGaming spokesman today:
"The company's discussions with the Department of
Justice have made good progress and it is currently negotiating the
final terms of a possible settlement. On the basis of the
discussions to-date, PartyGaming expects any settlement with the
Department of Justice to involve a payment by the company of an amount
that is significantly lower than that reported to be paid by Mr
Dikshit. In addition, the company
believes that any such settlement is unlikely to include a criminal
plea on the part of the company or any director."
Both settlements are seen as good news for shareholders in PartyGaming as the company looks to put the threat of prosecution from its once lucrative US business behind it. Shares in PartyGaming jumped 13.9% in London today in response to the news.
Read more about A. Dikshit's settlement on the so-called Internet here and here.
Tagged as: Anurag Dikshit, Online Poker, PartyGaming
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