@wa5
We don't know when Sondors left the building, ditched his partners. All we know is Sondors had the money and didn't pay A2. Something went wrong, but Sondors had the money. Having the money is almost always better than not having the money.
You asserted, over and over, that he was running a 'long con'. Wow, I guess not. He was in China for weeks building bikes and people are getting bikes. I don't know who will get a bike, but he says he is building the fully paid first wave bikes. That we will probably know, in a month or so.
There are theories of law that say Sondors didn't defraud A2. The contract is technical with a benchmark. Did A2 meet the benchmark. It's not clear. One theory is as good as another. It will be years if there is a trial. That's about a 1%. The old judgment is hard to figure, but it was a corporate dispute that is very common.
You say he spent the money he owed A2 on the bikes. That seems to be true, but only if the A2 claims pan out. A judge refused to give money to A2, as I recall, money still held by IGG. So Sondors, who had control of the money, made a business judgement to keep all the money in the bike building fund. That would be a way to look at it. But how will we get an accounting? I don't know where the early withdrawals went.
For all the time you spent on the campaign, you should have bought a bike. Of course, we still don't know where those foreign orders are. Taste is taste, so no point in arguing that.
You would need to separate out what went wrong between the partners to assign blame, anyway. Hopp may have designed the bike, the mechanicals, but Sondors may have designed the aesthetics. I don't know. Hopp never complained all that much, never filed a lawsuit.
Sondors knows a lot about ebikes at this point. He knows how to make things in China. If A2 and Hopp had remained in the campaign, and A2 received the 10%, would the bike be as good as it is? A2 and IGG just wanted cash to skim. They didn't know anything about building in China, and they didn't care. They were going to stick Sondors with the real work, and he was just a little PR toy to Chris.Why would they have gotten along? The bike you see is the bike Sondors built, whatever Hopp did last year. Has Hopp made a claim? What was supposed to happen at the end of the campaign? What was Sondors supposed to be paid? We don't know anything aside from the tantrums of an ad agency.
The one thing you always lacked about this campaign was trust. The people who did trust Storm, for whatever reason, how did that work out for them?
For me, there's a lot to like about Storm. It would be fun to talk to him, walking along the beach. As for Chris? Nothing there, I can see. The brief interview with Court is revealing. A2 and IGG? Well, you decide...
