It's a long, long story.
Short answer, Al Kahn, there's CEO and President (as well as founder) did a lot of deals that resulted in many instances of the Japanese losing on money that they rightfully deserved. They also did or tried to do a loop whole, by only reporting the funds "they" earned from video sales and other aspects of revenue, rather than reporting the total sum and giving % of the earned total income (instead only giving the % they were guaranteed back to the Japanese what they purposely earned). There was also the whole fiasco that happened with Chaotic, where instead of allowing the IP to slowly grow and flourish and slowly release things over time
, they did the LEVEL 5 thing and literally flooded the market with product, spending over Hundreds of Millions of dollars on it.
As you can guess, there was too much out there, people stopped buying it, and it put 4Kids deeply in the hole.
I'll need to note prior to this, 4Kids was absolutely hurt by the loss of Pokemon, but given some of their tactics and as we found out via the Lawsuit, they still owed the Japanese license, "The Pokemon Company", money even all those years later, it's no wonder The Pokemon Company did everything in their power to get 4Kids Entertainment out of the picture.
Afterwards, Al Kahn eventually "retired", and shortly after the whole TV Tokyo and ADK situation happened, almost as if the guy knew a storm was coming. Really what set off the lawsuit was TV Tokyo and ADK didn't terminate the contract properly, and instead just announced they were terminating (you have to file for a termination, and even the court even said had they done so, they'd been allowed to do so). While it would've likely resulted in a lawsuit either way, ultimately courts gave it to 4Kids on a technicality because of that, and TV Tokyo & ADK even had to pay damages as a result.
Anyways, despite winning the lawsuit, 4Kids was in an incredibly poor state, to the point they really couldn't run operations as normal. They ultimately initially bid of some major assets, such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, the CW block, and then once Konami and Saban agreed to do a joint bid, opted to sell off their Production studios to Konami, as well as give Saban additional titles (Chaotic, Sonic X, etc.,), which they had until the rights expired.
4Kids Production would then be renamed 4K Media, and the Yu-Gi-Oh! Licensing office would relocate to that building (for the record, I suspect the name was more of a coincidence. Konami had already established the name prior to anything going down, as it was intended to be the marketing company for Yu-Gi-Oh!, but once the whole sales assets and stuff came in, they opted to move base of operations for it in New York). Eventually Konami would just rename it to Konami Cross Media NY to better focus on non-Yu-Gi-Oh! titles that Konami owns (both internal and external licenses they represent).
As for 4Kids, they would be bought out and absorbed by another company, renamed 4Licensing. While initially they still held the titles for a couple things, their primary focus was sports gears. Eventually they filed for bankruptsy and then completely left the market.
...As for what Al Kahn is doing...
Here:
Originally was called CraneKahn, in their entire time since about 2012 or so, they've not put out anything they produced or dubbed/localized. And yes, for their dubbed content, they're still VERY MUCH doing their usual tactics per usual. Nothing has changed, at all. I wouldn't be surprised if Al Kahn is black listed from the Japanese industry, given everything that transpired, but hard to say.
Speaking of which, the guy presented a presentation at Tokyo Contents a couple years back.
It's uh... something:
There were some legit points made in there, but there was also some uh... questionable presentation and mentions as well.
www.youtube.com
