What do you mean by “continue trading”? Daybreak is a private company.
Entities owned by OFAC SDNs are cut out of the financial system. No means to collect revenue or pay bills and employees. There may be an asset freeze applicable too.
Rumors are they fired pretty much everybody except some service reps to keep the doors open.
They do have developers still on staff I think. A few old friends and colleagues have posted they avoided the layoffs. I have no idea as to the size.
Lucky, that means they’ll have a couple months to look for new jobs with less stress.
Columbus Nova, an investment vehicle, maybe with a Russian oligarch investor, right? He just happened to be caught up in the sanctions, right? Well, maybe not so much-- it turns out said oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, transferred half a million dollars to Michael Cohen from Columbus Nova, likely as repayment in part for the Stormy Daniels payoff.
So this suddenly becomes some very serious shit. If true.
greeeaaaat
I saw that this morning. Columbus Nova now implicated as part of the Cohen-Trump payoff schemes. Your MMO subscription and microtransaction money helped pay off Stormy Daniels so Trump could have his sex and still be President. #MAGA!
Add to that the fact that credible rumor now has it that the $1.6 mil in hush money Cohen paid to a former Playboy playmate wasn’t on behalf of a small-time RNC donor as first reported, but was likely a payment made by Cohen for TRUMP to keep her quiet about both the affair AND a terminated pregnancy. Wonder where that money came from? More Russian shell companies?
America! Fuck Yeah!
That’s certainly a rumor, but credible might be stretching it a bit.
Anyway we’re getting a bit P&R here.
I am, sorry, but it’s all tied in together. I’m just pissed because there is a growing possibility that some of the marquee names of the MMO era (Everquest, Planetside, LotRO, DDO) could go dark because fucking Russians meddled in the 2016 election. As if Trump as President isn’t bad enough, one of the places I use to escape that reality (LotRO) could end up negatively impacted by it.
Hopefully Daybreak can either divest itself from any connection/reliance on Columbus Nova or someone can swoop in and acquire the company, saving it and all the games it hosts. There are real people, good people, employed there, and it sucks that their jobs are in jeopardy because of the actions of people nobody even knew were associated with their investors.
If Daybreak is owned by Columbus Nova nobody can buy it as that would be putting money in Vekselberg’s pocket, which is not allowed by the sanctions. If it isn’t owned by Columbus Nova, and all the stuff they’re saying about that American dude is actually true, then they should be fine.
Could Daybreak be sold if it went into receivership, with the money going to the U.S. Government (as a seized asset kind of thing)?
I’m not a lawyer, so I have no idea. I imagine something like that would make sense.
I can tell you one thing, if I worked at Daybreak and I wasn’t presented with irrefutable evidence that Epstein owned the company and not Columbus Nova, I would be out that door as soon as humanly possible.
Boy, and I thought the Stardock/Toys For Bob tussle was going to be the industry legal story of the year!
Spoiler for politicalness:
Summary
Ah, not to contribute to the P&R-ness of this thread, but the sanctions have been softened and will possibly be lifted:
That’s a different rooskie, so I don’t see why it would impact Daybreak.
The oligarch in question owns a 30% stake in the aluminium company that’s getting it’s sanctions “softened.”
Yes, but they are different physical people, with different names. Loosening sanctions on one person does not transfer to another one.