In the workplace, it is the norm to hold a manager and partner accountable for the performance of his team, including to an extent any actions a team member does that might violate company policy, be illegal or unethical, the only exception might be if a manager followed company established procedures to prevent said negative activity that was insufficient.

I would also point out that lauda pushed back strongly against calling what aTriz did as being “wrong” (let alone being ‘scammy’ etc) and continues to do so. This means that someone who might not understand this is wrong, might look at laudas statements about the various aTriz scams and act similarly being under the impression that what they are doing is okay. Lauda went as far as to say that everyone engages in this type of behavior (allowing fraudulent statements to be made in a bounty campaign being run by him) by saying that this is a global issue. I don’t think it would be very fair to label someone as a scammer in the future when someone shown as somewhat trustworthy is arguing that said behavior is acceptable. There is little dispute as to the ethics of the underlying behavior, so I would say the question of if the behavior is acceptable is *not* a difference of opinion, nor is a political dispute. My impression as to the reason for the delay in calling aTriz a scammer is that he was given the benefit of the doubt in that it was assumed he was naive. The same cannot be said about lauda because it was explained why this is wrong prior to lauda defending the behavior in question.

Although I cannot affirmatively say what the relationship between the ALU partners is, however I can say that at the very least, lauda indirectly benefited from aTriz scams because it would have drawn additional business to ALU, some of which would have been handled by lauda. I would note that various contact methods point users to contact specific members of ALU and their ANN thread implies campaigns will be handled by both lauda and aTriz jointly.