You say this but I came into a similar problem here recently.
I did work for sweet money months ago and I didn't know it was for their new program sweetroyalties...they didn't show it to me.
Anyway during that time another client told me about a similar idea..when the sweet money thing rolled out I had only seen it like about 2 weeks before everyone else did..but my client who had a similar idea asked me if I had spoken to sweet money about it..but he soon realized they had spent way too much time for it to have been something done recently.