The latest development in the Australian company Intabill’s problems with online poker companies occurred today with a report in the Australia Courier-Mail that Kolyma Corporation AVV has filed a $52 million lawsuit against the company.
Back in May, it was reported in the same Australian paper that Intabill – a payment processing company which created and managed by internet entrepreneur Daniel Tzvetkoff – owed over $30 million to four different online poker sites. Intabill built much of their business through processing payments for major online poker rooms such as PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and the CEREUS Network (the combination of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet.) PokerStars and Full Tilt alleged that they were owed over a combined $25 million and the CEREUS Network tandem claimed the remainder of the $30 million.
The Kolyma Corporation lawsuit was filed soon after the original piece in the Australia Courier-Mail exposed the story. On May 25th, Kolyma’s court action was lodged in the Supreme Court in Brisbane. It named Intabill as one of the defendants alongside another Australian company, BT Projects. Tzvetkoff is also named individually in the court action along with his fellow developer of Intabill, Sam Sciacca, due to the fact that they personally guaranteed that Kolyma would receive the money that was due to them.
As one of the largest companies that works through Intabill, Kolyma is asking for a hefty amount of money through the Australian courts. Kolyma is seeking payment of an estimated debt of $43 million plus interest, which Kolyma says is increasing at $13,532 a day since the lawsuit was filed on May 25th. Tzvetkoff told Australia’s Sunday Mail they would defend the lawsuit but that he would not comment any further on the case.
Tzvetkoff and Sciacca have fallen from grace in a rapid fashion after building Intabill into a $120 million per year operation. The two men, after the creation of the company, found themselves on last year’s Sunday Mail Top 100 Rich List. Intabill, at its height of success, had more than 5000 customers in seventy countries. With half of its business coming from online gaming – including an alleged $150,000 per day in fees from one online gaming company alone – the daily take for the company could be as much as $1 million a day.
2009 has seen the company downsizing tremendously, however. In April, Intabill laid off 96 employees and only kept twenty to continue operation of the company. Tzvetkoff blamed the worldwide market conditions and increased loan funding costs for the reduction in size of the company. In May, Intabill then withdrew a multimillion-dollar sponsorship of the Team IntaRacing V8 Supercar team, which had only been announced a few months earlier.
The lawsuit that Kolyma has filed against Tzvetkoff, Sciacca and Intabill is in its infancy. Poker News Daily will continue to monitor the situation and report on any further action in the dispute.