The family office of secretive billionaire Harald McPike has accused US gaming investor Jason Ader of fraudulently inducing it into backing his special purpose acquisition company because he was under pressure to return $16mn to his mother. Rimu Capital alleges Ader pocketed the $25mn it had invested in the Spac to use for his “own personal purposes”, according to a filing made last month in the Southern District of New York. Ader’s mother had hired lawyers to help dispose of a $16mn stake in SpringOwl, her son’s investment firm, the filing states. Ader faces a growing number of legal headaches from the ill-fated attempt in 2021 to merge his Spac, 26 Capital Acquisition Corporation, with a casino business in the Philippines owned by Japan’s Universal Entertainment in a deal that would have seen it list in New York at a $2.6bn valuation. Once a gaming analyst on Wall Street, Ader shot to prominence in 2016 as an activist investor when he took on US media company Viacom and helped oust its chief executive. McPike began his career as a blackjack player and once admitted in a deposition that he had been banned from about 20 casinos for card counting, but went on to amass an estimated $1bn fortune investing in financial markets. Based in the Bahamas, he is the largest shareholder in London-based Starling Bank, founded a decade ago to challenge Britain’s biggest lenders.
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