What a post that took me 15 minutes to read 🤣 I'm not as certain about the part:
I mean at this point it's even difficult to imagine Justin didn't know about this
Ned's got a lot of flaws, but he's a good scammer when he has to be, using the fact that he was putting out 800,000 STEEM per month on the exchange, I don't think it was extremely hard to get Justin to swallow anything that was in a weak position and make him believe that those STEEM could be used any way he wanted. He was already baited and in demand for a great deal. At least that's what I think.
It's sure that if these funds had at least been split in two, one part for development via Steemit and the other on an independent and real marketing company (SteemPromote) in charge of advertising budgets things would have been different, now what's done is done and there's no point in looking back but moving forward because as they say in the country where I was born "with some ifs we could put Paris in a bottle".
When you're buying private corporations, it's safe to assume you're an accredited investor. Anything Justin Sun didn't know about Steemit, including any obligations it had undertaken regarding it's Steem hodlings, is entirely Justin Sun's responsibility.
Accredited investor
An accredited or sophisticated investor is an investor with a special status under financial regulation laws. The definition of an accredited investor (if any), and the consequences of being classified as such, vary between countries. Generally, accredited investors include high-net-worth individuals, banks, financial institutions and other large corporations, who have access to complex and higher-risk investments such as venture capital, hedge funds and angel investments.
Laws may require that some types of financial offerings may only be made to accredited investors.
Being responsible legally for something doesn't interfere with the fact that you may have been fooled. When you acquire a company of any kind you always have surprises that you didn't expect and will have to change (more or less) the direction of your business from what you had originally planned. It's part of business life ;)
The point of accrediting investors is that they have proved to exceed marginal competence at due diligence.
"with some ifs we could put Paris in a bottle" - a nice said! what country is that? just curious.
France ;)