Utopian could have just been open about it and assigned himself some stakes, no one was going to argue with him about it.
kodtycoon made a few statements of regret from selling early if I remember correctly, and that was during the $0.20 USD run NEM had about 1+years before 2017.
Remembering now, many of the devs gave themselves extra stakes and no one argued about it. Problem was when utopian decided to be deceitful, but who cares. That's ancient history in crypto time.