Karpeles has a lot of bitcoins. He is an early adopter and he was running one of the biggest exchanges. He must have more than 100k btc for himself in cold storage which was not related with mtgox. He is not an idiot he is told to pretend it. For sure a lot of bitcoins may have been lost but the problem here is the trust. If mtgox enable bitcoin withdrawals and the 550k costomers or a portion of them loose trust and try to sell their bitcoins then the price will go down down down... So the best strategy for him and for big investors is to claim that all btc had been lost if the majority eat that manipulation. The "leaked" document and the irc conversion is for testing reactions.

Pure manipulation...