Christmas has come early for Anurag Dikshit in a New York courtroom. The 39-year old former PartyGaming exec, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to violating the US federal Wire Act by accepting online bets from US customers, was sentenced on Thursday to one year of probation. Dikshit had previously forfeited some $300m of his (allegedly) ill-gotten gains to help grease the wheels of justice. In 2009, PartyGaming reached a non-prosecution agreement with US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York that will see the company pay a total of $105m in semi-annual installments ending Sept. 30, 2012.
Though he was potentially facing two years behind bars, Thursday’s sentence means Dikshit will avoid serving any time in jail. Noting that Dikshit was cooperating with federal prosecutors on an ongoing investigation, US District Judge Jed Rakoff said he was “persuaded that no jail time is appropriate here.”
But Rakoff took government prosecutors to task over the lack of progress on similar poker-related prosecutions, for instance, the other two PartyGaming founders, Ruth Parasol Deleon and husband Russell Deleon. “It has been two years since [Dikshit] began cooperating, what’s going on?”
“There are reasons” for the lack of action, claimed Asst. US Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown, who made cryptic references to sealed papers filed with the court that show the investigation is by no means concluded. Helped along by fellow plea-dealer Daniel Tzvetkoff, perhaps?
