It's not just that they could possibly survive as a company if they tried their very best, it's also that it makes no sense from their PoV given the alternative exit strategies. Coming back would just NOT undo the damage, it would be a substantial risk for those involved. Going incognito elsewhere or selling their IP (keeping a big kitty in form of unpaid BTC) looks a lot better than coming back right into a shitstorm.
I'm afraid you have been karpeled your BTC. Even Karpeles will likely keep some of the BTC kitty he ratted out of MtGox and get to enjoy it. In this case it's not nearly as prosecutable. FC is missing. The other guy also ran a ponzi by not informing the public that he was paying dividends out of pocket with no underlying revenue, and this guy apparently is well known, but what can he actually be held accountable for under which jurisdiction.
I don't know guys, this looks a bit helpless. And the lesson here is that Havelock cannot offer much guarantee at all of the stocks they host, and provenly so.
Blaming Havelock here I dont think makes any sense. People were happily trading ASICMINER outside of any exchange, and later on the now defunct BTCT. You can't protect investors from scams 100%.
Not blaming Havelock, but stating the obvious. They don't offer protection from this sort of scams. If this happened in a regular market they would be prosecuted, but Havelock doesn't seem to have the legal muscle to do anything about it, might not even have the knowledge about the underlying operations to execute any sort of reasonable protection.
If that's not the case I'll be happy to be proven wrong but that's what it's looking like to me right now.