Tuesday, June 28, 2011

A little house in Wyoming connected to Black Friday

I was just browsing the Yahoo news stories of the day, and was curious about this headline from a Reuters story: "A Little House of Secrets on the Great Plains." It turns out that inside this residential address is a company that exists to set up and operate shell corporations for other business entities. OK, that's mildly interesting. But I was greatly surprised to find inside the story a nugget about poker's Black Friday:

Among the entities registered at 2710 Thomes, Reuters found, is a shelf company sheltering real-estate assets controlled by a jailed former prime minister of Ukraine, according to allegations made by a political rival in a federal court in California.

The owner of another shelf company at the address was indicted in April for allegedly helping online-poker operators evade a U.S. ban on Internet gambling. The owner of two other firms there was banned from government contracting in January for selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon....

In 2008, Rubin fled to Costa Rica to avoid arrest for contempt in the civil case. Authorities allege he went on to run another payment-processing operation from abroad: This March 10, he and 10 others were indicted in New York for allegedly running a massive scheme to hide payments made by U.S. customers to the three largest online-poker websites, in violation of a ban passed by Congress in 2006. He was extradited from Guatemala the same month. On June 8, a New York judge denied bail for Rubin.

Stuart Meissner, an attorney for Rubin, said his client was not available for comment.

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