So Tang and Devasini were just taking on the liabilities incurred by the delays in forced liquidation when the market crashed? As opposed to having lenders take the hit? Am I understanding correctly, and if so, what's wrong with that?
You're not understanding it at all.
Imagine you go to a poker game. You pay some cash in and get given your chips to play with.
Well in this game (according to myself) some of your opponents were given chips without having to pay for them. That means you lose either way:
If you lose to them then your money is gone.
If you win at the poker then there's not enough money to buy your chips back off you.
Replace poker with 'gamble by margin-trading on the BTC/USD currency pair' and that's what is being alleged. The extent to which it (in practice) harmed investors would depend on the price at which bids were placed to buy forced-executed closes : were they at or above market or well below (with a timely DC from Gox to force the execution onto internal orders). Remember there's no advantage to the person having a forced-execution for it to be to someone associated with the site rather than to random stranger on MtGox. And there's no real benefit to the site either - as selling BTC held in trust for a user to someone who hasn't deposited the cash to pay for the BTC isn't better in ANY respect than selling to someone for actual cash.
If true it would sound like the Tang situation was along the lines of Tang saying "Can I borrow $150K? I think BTC is going to go back up shortly so I'd like to buy up some cheap BTC from all the panic sellers and people forced to sell due to margin calls". And the site crediting him with it. Obviously that's horrendous for all other users of the site - as if he gets his trading wrong and then doesn't pay then $150k of THEIR cash has now vanished.
Whether it's true or not is hard to tell. There's two reasons why -
1. Myself is a self-confessed liar. If what he's saying now is true then he lied previously when claiming everything was honest on the site - and generally acted in a deceptive manner for months, only blowing the whistle when he got cut out from the take. So we have to decide whether he lied then, now or both times. And we can't take his word for it - so we lack evidence to reach any conclusion.
2. Scrooge not responding is consistent with innocence (he doesn't want to waste time on entirely fabricated allegations) or with guilt (he just wants the topic to die so he can get away with it). So we can't conclude anything from the lack of a detailed rebuttal.
The allegations do have the ring of truth about them to me. But I'd never actually go so far as to reach a conclusion based just on that. The problem is that although we now all know for certain that myself is a liar, we don't know how GOOD at lieing he is. So he could just be a very accomplished liar able to make up a convincing-sounding allegation.
Either way myself should get the scammer tag - either for deceiving investors back then or for trying to besmirch the site now (or, conceivably, both). His own posts convict on one or the other - no need to decide which to give the tag.
If mods want to move forward with the unclescrooge tag then a good starting point would be asking him to confirm or deny whether the email referring to Tang is legitimate. It's likely it can be verified that it's genuine (if it IS genuine and if he denies it). If he admits its genuine then an explanation of why they were loaning site members' cash to 'Mr Tang' would be welcome.
Doubt anyone gives a shit about the falling out over the detail of a contract which had no specified duration.