To be fair Phaedrus77 said:
"All the relevant exhibits are redacted, so it’s impossible to tell if Bass is spinning this."
OK so there could have been other impairments. Big deal. Does not mean it's a Ponzi scheme. Bass is trying to deflect attention from the short and distort scheme he executed. Even if impairments were required and not properly applied it does not exonerate Bass for what he did.
So this is the "spin" here from Bass lawyers... to focus on the past, the indictment and the "smoking gun email" - which I indeed would love to see.
On the indictment - I would like to note that Greenlaw and Co. did NOT take the "deal" where they would have dropped the Bivens case vs not being indicted. This how the feds normally get 99.8% conviction rate as the plea deal is always a much lower than than maximum possible sentence whilst they threaten to go for maximum sentence if you don't take the deal, especially when they know you are low on resources.
Such a crooked system that indeed convicts wrongly in a lot of instances.
Now once the accused "survive" these crooked DOJ plea deal threats (because of money, stamina and bravery) and it goes to trial, amazingly the odds change in favour of the defendant(s) ex-post.
According to my calcs the indictment has an 87% chance to be dismissed/lost at trial based on the history of cases going to trial when the plea is not taken.
Why would a guy that is well off like Greenlaw risk a prison term? Well because he believes the allegations are crap or he knows of enough wrongdoing (search warrant validity, collusion, information leakage, assisted insider trading) for this case to collapse...
Remember that the SEC settled on similar claims because arguably, UDF could have done those fund to fund ash movements at arm's length and with certainty is allowed to pay dividend from ANY source (see bylaws).
So we have some arguable impairments in the past
ONE smoking gun email found in a huge amount of discovery documents
Some re-hash of SEC allegations used by the DOJ as failed threat that they had to follow through with a high chance now to be dismissed
If this is "it" after years of investigation it seems like the SEC/FBI/DOJ/BASS complex is running out of options...
More popcorn please!