DragonCon has separated from its founder, Ed Kramer, who has been awaiting trial for sex crimes involving minors, and who received a large annual payout from the event. His continued financial interest in the event has been controversial for some time. READ THE REST
I’m a bit disturbed that DragonCon paid this guy, if the last buyout offers were any indication, between $500k and $1 million, to go away. I would think that there would be some kind of way for the court to seize the shares as restitution pending trial, and a way for DragonCon to fire him outright.
But, at least he is no longer making money through DragonCon.
Even assuming he is proven entirely guilty as charged on all counts(a process that still seems to be in process), there wouldn’t be any obvious reason why his crime would have any bearing on his ownership stake in a business.
It is entirely possible that he will incur fines as punishment for some criminal charge, or end up seeing some significant civil claims; but even that would chip away at his holdings on the premise that they were still his property and thus valid targets for punishment or civil judgement.
You don’t just magically lose your property on being charged with a crime(unless it’s The War On Drugs, of course, in which case you don’t even need to be charged with anything for the cops to get some sweet, sweet, forfeiture action) and I suspect that he didn’t include a “Any shareholder whose continued presence is really embarrassing is automatically removed” clause back when the organization was founded.
It’s entirely possible that the guy is scum; but this is one of those situations where any legal codification of him getting what he may well deserve would have some wildly unfortunate applications elsewhere…
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Unless the entire convention was just a front for him to pick up underage girls, I have trouble seeing the relevance too.
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