Former Indian online poker billionaire avoids jail in US

WASHINGTON - Thanks to confusion over how US law applies to online poker, Anurag Dikshit, a former Indian online poker billionaire, has escaped with only one year of probation and no jail time.

Dikshit, 39, an Indian citizen had travelled from his home in Gibraltar with a one-way ticket to New York to attend Thursday’s sentencing hearing in a US court, where he faced a maximum of two years in prison, Forbes reported.

He pleaded guilty in 2008 to one count of violating the federal wire act and agreed to forfeit $300 million. As part of his original plea deal, Dikshit agreed to cooperate in an ongoing investigation with federal prosecutors, who did not seek any jail time.

“I came to believe there was a high probability it was in violation of US laws,” Dikshit was quoted as saying of his work at PartyGaming, the online poker company that he helped build, at the court hearing when he pleaded guilty in 2008.

Dikshit, who is married with two children, had reached out to federal prosecutors in the US to initiate the negotiations that resulted in his 2008 guilty plea.

Dikshit’s plea deal was originally seen as an important victory for the Department of Justice, which has long taken the position that facilitating for-money online poker in America violates US law, making no distinction between sports betting-clearly illegal-and poker playing.

A few months after Dikshit pleaded guilty, his former company, PartyGaming, a Gibraltar company that was once the world’s biggest online gaming company, struck a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, admitting that its US operations for years had violated US law.

At Thursday’s hearing, US District Judge Jed Rakoff wondered why there have been no other prosecutions, specifically mentioning Dikshit’s fellow PartyGaming cofounders, Americans Ruth Parasol DeLeon and her husband Russell DeLeon.

“Nobody else has been indicted,” Rakoff was quoted as saying by Forbes. “It has been two years since this defendant began cooperating, what’s going on?”

Assistant US Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown said that the investigation that involved Dikshit remains ongoing, pointing to sealed papers the gvernment filed with the court.

“There are challenges in this prosecution,” said Devlin-Brown, adding that Dikshit had asked to settle the case at its very early stages. “It has been two years and there are reasons.”