due to Mt. Gox's novelty as well as its huge size, it is rather unique, and undoubtedly will be quite some challenge to the legal authorities in terms of its complexity.
The Madoff ponzi was much bigger than MtGOX: 64 billion US$. WorldCom, Enron, Lehmann Bros, Washington Mutual, were many times bigger than MtGOX, and much more complicated, with dozens of subsidiaries, branches, etc.. Even the Brazilian oil company OGX and the Brazilian MLM scam TelexFree were much bigger.
In Japan there was, for example, memory manufacturer Elpida (5.5 billion $) and Japan Airlines (at least 10 billion $). (JAL was one case when the bankruptcy did not end in liquidation: the government bailed it out in part, and put pressure on creditors to suspend their demands and give it a chance, so it was back in normal operation after 2 years.)
I'm still not sure I would ever call 220,000 BTC a "messy pile of assets." It would smell rather sweet to me.
You cannot consider only the pluses and ignore the minuses. When it closed, MtGOX did not have 220'000 BTC, it had
minus 660'000 BTC.
Sunlot wanted to do just that: convince the Japanese court to stop the liquidation and sell them all the MtGOX assets -- including the 220'000 BTC -- for 1 BTC, but without the 660'000 BTC debt to their clients. That would have been very sweet idned -- for Sunlot, not at all for the clients.
Those 220'000 coins indeed are a relatively uncomplicated part of the assets (although they may have to be auctioned; if not, returning them as BTC may be a big legal and accounting headache). The messy parts include the loans of 13 million dollars to mark and his other companies; the money in various bank accounts; the suspended Coinlab lawsuit; the assets of the US subsidiary (and others perhaps); and understanding what happened to the 660'000 missing coins.
It appears that the bankruptcy liquidation route was largely unnecessary, [ ... ] and could have been chosen primarily in order to evade having Mark Karpeles testify in a Texas hearing last April. See
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mt.goxflap.pdf If that is truly the case, then the company may have been fraudulently pushed into liquidation. It seems now that Karpeles will never have to travel to the U.S. and testify.
The decision to liquidate the company was totally inevitable given that its obligations were ~500 M$ more than its assets. Far from being "fraudulent", the decision to liquidate MtGOX may be the only part of this saga that was totally transparent and undeniably correct under the law...
The purpose of the bankruptcy law is precisely to suspend any creditors' lawsuits already underway, and block any new ones. It will not prevent more specific lawsuits in the future, civil or criminal, against the
people involved -- e.g. for fraudulent management (if Kobayashi does not start some himself). But the civil lawsuits against the company MtGOX will be aborted, and there will be no more point in starting new ones -- because even the corpse of MtGOX will have ceased to exist.
By the way, when people say "file for bankruptcy", that is a short for "ask the courts for
protection from creditors' lawsuits as specified in the bankruptcy law."
My understanding of what happened in the US courts is limited. I
think (not sure) that several things happened, in some order:
* MtGOX USA filed for bankruptcy protection in the US too, after MtGOX KK did so in Japan.
* An US judge aborted that MtGOX USA bankruptcy process because he concluded that it was best for the Japanese court to handle it too.
* Greene and Lack sued MtGOX in the US. They claimed to have evidence of wrongdoings by MtGOX managers.
* The court requested Mark to show up to testify in the Greene & Lack case. Mark was very relctant to do so.
* The Sunlot guys convinced Greene & Lack to withdraw their lawsuit and support Sunlot's plan to stop the liquidation and take over MtGOX.
It must be noted that Sunlot had already promised immunity to Gay-Bouchery and McCaleb, even before starting any investigation. And they never replied when asked about whether they would extend that coutesy to Mark too. if we are talkng of cover-ups and evading justice, then...
Also Sunlot never replied when asked whether GB and McC and Mark would get their share of the 220'000 together with (or before) the other clients. (IIRC, Japanese liquidation law, like the US one, says that management is always last in the queue of creditors, so they should get nothing in this case.)