You cannot possibly believe this to be true.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I genuinely do believe it. I believe that every single XRP we give away, we give away because we believe that best furthers the long-term prospects for Ripple as a payment network and that is in the best interests of OpenCoin.
Yes well again, OpenCoin's stated (and open) business plan is to make profits from XRP price appreciation. So by definition, everything they do is going to try to get XRP to go higher, in both the short-term, and long-term.
So unless someone is accusing individuals in the company of blatant corruption (which I haven't heard), then yes all the giveaways, secret or not, is still designed to get 1 XRP to be worth more and more.
You can criticize how they are going about it and think they are making mistakes, but doesn't seem logical to question their overall motives.
Anyway back on topic, XRP is still hanging out just below .01. Volume seems to be kind of low the last fwe hours but seems to usually go up overnight (in terms of USA east coast hours). So I don't know if that means big buyers in Europe or Asia or what, but that has been the trend for awhile. So should be interesting to see where it is in 8 or 9 hrs.