The initial confusion was over who is responsible as the GP - the part time owner devoting maybe 5 hours a week? The new owners who had no experience operating the site? The middleman who acts on behalf of the owner and has no technical knowledge? That's why payments were initially complicated and delayed.
So it seems that internal wrangling over who would be responsible as a GP directly caused the delay in customer reimbursements (and by extension the more recent theft of 350.000 USD from customer deposits)?
For those who doubt we were not the GP, you can run 'git log' in the sourcecode. We had no responsibility to take on payments, but we did (and finalised the formation of Bitcoinica Consultancy to do so).
So you guys finalized the formation of Bitcoinica Consultancy, but not as the GP? Then as what? A charitable organization?
It would appear that a lot of misinformation has circulated since the date of my last post. Considering the many inconsistencies, I will assume astute readers here have already discounted the versions of facts presented by the Consultancy.
The Consultancy members accepted that responsibility on April 24 as operators and General Partners of Bitcoinica LP. There is ample written documentation to confirm this.
The statements of Genjix and Tihan seem to conflict here. So we still don't know who the GP is and customers continue to suffer due to corporate infighting. Or maybe it is just me that is clueless?
I think that the position of the Intersango guys was that weren't technically general partners at the time of the Rackspace intrusion because the paperwork for establishing Bitcoinica Consultancy hadn't been completed and that therefore they had neither any liability for the intrusion nor any authority to initiate the claims process. Tihan's position was that they did have both liability and authority and that not completing the paperwork would be regarded as an attempt to avoid that liability.
While you're always liable if you're on the corporate documents, whether or not you're actively participating in the business, not being on the corporate documents doesn't necessarily protect you from liability if you've been essentially acting as a director. The announcement had already been made that Bitcoinica Consultancy would be acting as general partner and operating the business from 24 April and as far as we know they were actually doing that when the Rackspace intrusion occurred - which may mean they would be found to have been acting as directors of the general partner whether or not the paperwork had been signed.
The Intersango guys are essentially saying "we did everyone a favour by signing the paperwork to create Bitcoinica Consultancy so we could handle the claims process - and we weren't legally obliged to do that". In fact, much discussion has gone on about what people
weren't legally obliged to do - Tihan covering the Rackspace losses, Zhou helping rebuild records after the Rackspace intrusion, the Intersango handling the claims process. There's been much less discussion of how each of the parties intends to proceed now and that probably won't be known until they've received legal advice on where they each stand in terms of liability, not just to users but also to each other.