This link is to the Neteller Investors site. The presentation on their latest interim results (Sep 06) contains some interesting information for anyone concerned about where their cash is and the scale of the problem
http://tinyurl.com/yvrecr
Skipping over the revenues and business plan stuff the interesting bits are about the total deposits and the cash position for the company.
Slide 13 is the most important as it shows where the cash is - EU Customer money in trust $48.1m, owing to customers merchants $220.1m (in trust accounts), $28.8m company cash (restricted) in trust accounts - this is the money put into trust to cover cash in transfer and a few other company bits and bobs where the money is there but basically spent ie share options....then there is the company cash of $135.9m which is not held in trust.
Most of this money is invested not really cash it would take time to access it. On average per day Neteller deals with about $4.7m of transfers plus their normal business transactions the readily accessible cash would be scaled to meet this demand. They can't access the EU money to meet US withdrawals but the strong cash position of the company roughly equal to or just below US customers deposits should be reassuring especially as the US customers money is there - in trust accounts.
Looks to me like the money is there, they have logistics problems and issues accessing the cash immediately but any company used to dealing with $5m a day was suddenly swamped with requests for up to $200m and a set of US banks unwilling to deal with them at all wold need time to pay out and struggle to answer the phones/complaints.
$200m is chump change to the city (they just paid out $38bn in bonuses to their staff for 2006), Neteller has the cash they just need the City to help them access it quickly via loans and guarantees from others. In short I think everyone will get their cash from Neteller.
PS Dav the UK regulators would not let the US customers get shafted to protect EU customers it would destroy the City of London if non EU customers felt they were not protected by our regulation - you are pointing to a normal company legal structure for regulatory purposes not some conspiracy to leave out US citizens from protection.