On Tuesday, the first video in a multi-part series was published on PokerNews featuring embattled Full Tilt Poker front man Howard Lederer (pictured). “The Professor” hasn’t spoken publicly about Full Tilt since Black Friday and PokerNews began with a 30-minute installment entitled, “The Beginning of Full Tilt Poker.” Note that you must sign up for a free PokerNews account in order to view the Howard Lederer interview.

Lederer began by acknowledging the point of the interview: “Now is the time for the poker public to get some answers to questions they deserved to get answered, for them to get some facts that have obviously not been shared with them over the last 15 months.There were very good reasons why the company and the principles were not discussing these issues in public during the last 15 months, but now that the deal has been completed, I think this is the time.”

According to Lederer, the blame for what went awry with Full Tilt Poker should not lie squarely with him. He told PokerNews COO Matt Parvis at the Palazzo in Las Vegas, “I am one person in what was a very complicated situation, so I don’t have all the answers and I don’t have all the facts. I am going to try my best here to offer the facts I know.”

By the time Lederer was invested in Full Tilt, his fellow LLC members included Rafe Furst(pictured), Phil Gordon, Perry Friedman, and Andy Bloch. Lederer explained, “It was intended that 5% of company profits be set aside for the key endorsers of the site to recognize that they were bringing something extra.”

Full Tilt was formed as a California LLC whose makeup, direction, and decisions could be influenced by a simple majority vote of owners. Its original Board of Directors consisted of Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Ray Bitar, Friedman, and Lederer. The latter noted, “I think for the first couple of years I didn’t receive a salary. There was a promise of equity if the company did well.”

Full Tilt Poker received its first license from the Canadian-based Kahnawake Gaming Commission. Lederer narrated that Bitar was charged with securing the KGC’s blessing: “Ray was CEO, so he was the one who dealt with all of the licensing. It was a lot of work.” Lederer said Full Tilt had over $2.5 million in cash when the site launched in 2004 and there wasn’t any talk of distributions out of the gate.

What about the structure of Full Tilt’s bank accounts? Why were player deposits not segregated from operating funds? “I don’t know,” responded Lederer. “The company was strong, the reports looked good. There wasn’t this idea of segregated trust accounts. I don’t think it was done anywhere in the industry. It wasn’t anything that was of a real concern.”

Much of the first 30-minute interview centered on Bitar’s leadership role. Lederer revealed that Full Tilt pro John Juanda “was a vocal owner in the anti-Ray Bitar camp.” Also anti-Bitar was Friedman, who reportedly led a vote at the end of 2006 to try to remove him from his post as CEO.

When asked if Bitar(pictured) was “qualified” to be CEO, Lederer answered, “Not in any traditional sense. I know he had a passion for the company. Did he have some MBA degree? No, absolutely not. From a level of education… no, he wasn’t qualified. He was also an owner, so he was very invested in the company. He was brought in to run the company by Chris [Ferguson]. In a lot of areas, he was doing a really good job.”

Parvis then moved on to the subject of shareholder distributions. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Full Tilt shelled out well over $400 million to its shareholders, and Lederer said the money started flowing outbound in 2007: “The company was growing and it was reinvesting all of its profits, so I don’t think we ever got close to making any distributions before they actually started, which would have been in April 2007. I don’t know that it was any one particular person’s idea… The company had a lot of excess cash that we didn’t think it needed at the time.”

The paucity of “excess cash” would ultimately contribute to Full Tilt’s downfall. According to Lederer, not everyone was on board with the idea of paying out profits: “There is one person among the membership who was always very anti-distribution, never wanted to make them in the first place, always argued very strongly against them, and always argued that every single distribution would weaken the company, and that was Chris Ferguson (pictured). He didn’t have any use for the money. He didn’t have any need for the money. He’s the opposite of greedy in that way.”

Lederer added that he was not concerned about Full Tilt’s sustainability: “I was being shown some kind of a general balance sheet often enough where I was very confident that we had cash well in excess of customer deposits at all times when distributions were being paid. I don’t think our regulator was demanding that and there was not pressure from the poker community.”

He added, “From every owner on down, people were pushing for distributions, but no owner would have wanted a distribution if we didn’t have cash in excess of what our player balances were. It would be completely unfair to characterize the owners as greedy [in that sense].”

Finally, Lederer claimed that Full Tilt moved its operation from the United States to Ireland not because of a cloudy legal climate, but rather because of an intention to float the company on the London Stock Exchange.

On whether Bitar insulated himself from the pressures of Full Tilt’s owners by being in Dublin, Lederer relayed, “When we were 100 strong in L.A. and I was there 60% or 70% of the time, I had a really good handle and a really good relationship with a lot of the employees. I had a lot of influence over company culture. I definitely lost control of that in Dublin.”

PokerNews will be releasing additional installments of “The Lederer Files” in the coming days.