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At seven-feet tall and around 300 pounds, Shaquille O’Neal is kind of a hard guy to miss.
That is, unless of course you’re lawyers representing investors into a cryptocurrency scam that O’Neal endorsed.
The Big Diesel isn’t the only athlete to back to back the scam, which was created by crypto “company” FTX.
Tom Brady, his ex-wife Gisele Bundchen, Steph Curry, Shohei Ohtani, Naomi Osaka, David Ortiz, Trevor Lawrence, Udonis Haslem and Larry David (but NOT Taylor Swift), were all named in a class-action lawsuit due to endorsement deals they had with FTX.
But Shaq is shifty for a guy his size. And the Inside the NBA co-host has thus far been able to avoid lawyers representing a number of investors reports Joseph De Avila of the Wall Street Journal.
“In 30 years, I’ve never had to deal with this situation,” lawyer Adam Moskowitz told De Avila. “We are not going away.”
FTX, of course, was the massive crypto company led by now-disgraced former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
New CEO John Ray, who took over Enron after its incredible collapse in 2001, said he had never seen anything like the FTX collapse according to a New York Times article.
https://twitter.com/CergatB/status/1593234094112247814?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1593234094112247814%7Ctwgr%5E8ac857b56dd8029e09b1eedb0d580d6268f17701%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbrobible.com%2Fculture%2Farticle%2Fnew-ftx-ceo-unprecedented-failure-sbf-latest-comments%2F
Ray wrote that in his career he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate control”. He then added “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
O’Neal’s dodgy ways (both literally and figuratively) aren’t new. He’s avoided lawyers now for several months, dating back to at least March.
Daniel Kaplan of The Athletic reported that “lawyers for the former FTX account holders claimed several of the athletes tried to dodge service, and O’Neal has not yet been served, and the litigators are hiring private investigators to aid in tracking him down.”
Have they tried just showing up on the Inside the NBA set? Just a thought…