Quote from: repentance on July 17, 2012, 08:31:10 PM

I think that the position of the Intersango guys was that weren't technically general partners at the time of the Rackspace intrusion because the paperwork for establishing Bitcoinica Consultancy hadn't been completed and that therefore they had neither any liability for the intrusion nor any authority to initiate the claims process. Tihan's position was that they did have both liability and authority and that not completing the paperwork would be regarded as an attempt to avoid that liability.

Agreed. I appears Tihan set up CORE CREDIT LIMITED as the GP on 2012/02/09 (*1) However he did not find an actual party willing to act as GP until sometime before 2012/04/24 when the Bitcoin Consultancy signed the 'Bitcoinica limited partnership agreement' (*2). After this contract was signed the Bitcoin Consultancy group was pretty clear in Donald's announcement that they were acting as the new operators and managing directors of Bitcoinica (*3):

Quote

While Bitcoinica had some previous security concerns, namely where the attack on the Linode cloud hosting provider generated them a loss of 40k BTC, Bitcoinica has fully recovered from the loss and no longer depends so heavily on 3rd party platforms. The Bitcoinica reigns have been taken up by the recognized development group called the Bitcoin Consultancy which have a record of solid security in the tumultuous world of Bitcoin. Despite their growth and their recent announcement, Tong is still a developer for Bitcoinica.

However Zhou kept operating the site on a daily basis in practice and the Bitcoin Consultancy guys failed to supply the NZ Companies office with valid docs to reflect their director status and so technically the GP was not fully formed:

Quote from: genjix on July 13, 2012, 09:00:07 AM

We kept sending the paperwork back saying it's incomplete and there's problems, so when the initial compromise happened, the company was not yet fully formed.

Quote from: genjix on June 10, 2012, 04:31:02 PM

The problem is that Bitcoinica Consultancy only begun the process of being formed when the attack happened. The paper work was not completed and we weren't acting as GP. Tihan is asking us to finish completing the formation of Bitcoinica Consultancy first, while we are asking for legal authorisation to conduct payments on their behalf.

Although Bitcoinica Consultancy was not fully formed in terms of documentation, the Bitcoin Consultancy guys were assumed to bear all liabilities of Bitcoinica LP ever since the takeover on April 24.

Quote from: zhoutong on May 26, 2012, 05:04:49 AM

Bitcoinica Consultancy has three people including two technical experts. They have been working in Bitcoinica for more than one month. And they're assumed to bear all liabilities of Bitcoinica LP.

Finally on May 30 the General Partner 'CORE CREDIT LIMITED' was renamed to 'BITCOINICA CONSULTANCY LIMITED' (*4) and a couple of days ago Genjix mentioned that they *did* finalize the formation of BITCOINCA CONSULTANCY so that would imply that they *are* the Bitcoinica GP at least at this point in time.

Quote from: genjix on July 13, 2012, 09:00:07 AM

We had no responsibility to take on payments, but we did (and finalised the formation of Bitcoinica Consultancy to do so).

In the end it seems they have been playing a game of hot potato over who would be responsible at the expense of their customers. Everybody in Bitcoinica LP has been too busy covering their collective asses and pointing fingers at each other. Even at this late stage they have not been able to put on a united front and take decisive action in the best interest of their customers. There have been no police reports, no official updates on their website and previous promises such as 'All withdrawal requests will be honored.' are demonstrably false. Things have gone from bad to worse and hopefully we finally have reached rock bottom now so salvage operations can begin.

References:
(*1) http://www.societies.govt.nz/scanned-images/06/BC10060962006.pdf
(*2) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84042.msg953326#msg953326
(*3) http://bitcoinmedia.com/first-licensed-advanced-trading-platform-for-bitcoin/
(*4) http://www.business.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/3715077/documents