While Full Tilt Poker scrambled to complete a deal with its mysterious “European investors” in time to save the company from further damage, the site failed to have any success in solving their problems, with negotiations with the Alderney Gaming Control Commission (AGCC) ending in a lot of hypothetical discussions.
Full Tilt has been scrambling to get its site reopened in Europe as quickly as possible, due in large to threats from Arjel, the organization that oversees French gaming (Arjel is to France what the AGCC is to Alderney) that they will lose their license if French players are not allowed access to their accounts and allowed to play “immediately”. A week later, Arjel has announced that Full Tilt’s time is up, and the regulatory body for online poker play in France has suspended Full Tilt’s license to play in France.
The English translation of Arjel’s statement is as follows:
Paris, July 4, 2011
Suspension of registration of the company Rekop Limited (fulltiltpoker.fr)
The panel of the Regulatory Authority of online gaming has decided to suspend, as a precaution, the approval of the operator of online poker.
After this period of suspension, justified by the interruption technique to access the site. Fr and the need for new economic and financial guarantees from the operator, who was given notice on 16 May file a request for confirmation of approval, the college will decide the continuation or revocation of this approval.
The ARJEL is in contact with the operator of any conditions to ensure a satisfactory refinancing of the latter, a necessary condition for confirmation of the approval and protection of the interests of players.
As Arjel explains in their statement, because of the loss of license from the AGCC, Full Tilt cannot open their doors to new players until their American players have been given their money back, and the site has no means of gaining income, due to the revocation of their license, so the site will be forced to sell. Because of the wild ride that Full Tilt Poker has been on since Black Friday, but especially in the last week and a half, Arjel has decided to pull Full Tilt Poker’s license to operate in France– largely as a precaution. Arjel does not want to see what happened to American Full Tilt Poker players happen in France.
The Full Tilt website, which previously said that the site was down first for “system maintenance” and then for “a system upgrade” (neither of which is true, save for in the most generous interpretation of those words), now has a message from the AGCC, stating that they are in discussions with Full Tilt and a still-unnamed third party to try to reopen the Full Tilt Poker site, but that, as of yet, talks are all that’s happening.
Read the statement from the AGCC below:
Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) is in discussions, all be at an early stage, with its licensees trading as Full Tilt Poker and a third party concerning the prospective refinancing of Full Tilt Poker.
The objective of these discussions is to enable the site to re-open to its current and prospective players.
Contrary to current reports circulating in the media, AGCC has not authorised any statement by legal counsel in this regard and has no knowledge of the comments attributed by the editor of Gambling City.net to a Mr. Werner Bers, of whom we are otherwise unaware, and disputes the correctness of his statement.
All and any further authorised announcements on this matter will be found on the website of AGCC at www.gamblingcontrol.org
Only time will tell if Full Tilt Poker will make it back after the series of surprising upsets that it has suffered, but with every license that gets pulled, it seems a little more unlikely that Full Tilt will be able to reclaim the status that it once held.