Disciplinary committee says its claims that investors were prepared to fund its 60 million kronor ($8.5 million USD) purchase of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay was misleading.
Global Gaming Factory’s (GGF) bid to buy Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay just got more and more unlikely with news that the disciplinary committee of AktieTorget, the stock market where it’s traded, found it guilty of misleading the market and formally delisted it.
Aktietorget first suspended the stock back in August so that GGF could prove that “more than 60 million kronor has been offered by investors” to finance its purchase of the Pirate Bay to “establish a system of legal downloading.” It was later referred to its disciplinary committee for formal review.
It also added a number of criticisms including GGF’s lack of written documentation proving that informal bids for the Pirate Bay were made by Napster co-founder John Fanning and an unspecified Russian company back in late July.
AktieTorget determined that inadequate proof of both were a serious violation of its requirements that all companies provide only information that is accurate, relevant and reliable.
“They give a systematic impression of a lack of accountability and of an almost casual and unsuspecting attitude to include the disclosure requirements,” reads the decision. “In light of this, and when the Committee questions the company’s ability to provide information correctly, finds the Disciplinary Committee at an overall assessment that the company should be excluded from trade.”
To his credit pandeya still insists all is well and that he’s prepared to inject capital for the completion of the acquisition “if needed due to unforeseen circumstances.” In fact, he put up his 150 million shares in GGF as a security deposit to guarantee the deal goes through. Now that this won’t happen those shares are pretty much worthless and remove an option for him to raise the necessary capital.
He also insisted almost 2 weeks ago that the deal would be finalized “within the next eight days” after AktieTorget allows it to resume trading. It remains to be seen what he does next.
Pandeya’s responded so far by calling officials at AktieTorget “incredibly scared” and “very weak people,” which is not exactly a way to get back in their good graces by any means.
His personal finances have also been rapidly deteriorating due to the Swedish govt’s claim of more than 780,000 kronor ($110,987 USD) owed in back taxes.
“We are of course very sorry for the small shareholders who have acted on wrong information,” AktieTorget’s VP Peter Gönczi told di.se.”It is they who suffer most.”
Surely, but also have those like myself who’ve been caught up in this three-ring circus.
More importantly, it looks like the Pirate Bay will have to figure something else out because unless Pandeya wins a Swedish lottery he’s not going to have enough cash to buy it, and even if he did he’ll have nothing left over for licensing deals, infrastructure, etc..
Stay tuned.
On July 2nd, I outlined in a publicly-posted article the overwhelming evidence that this “sale” of TPB was nothing more than a pump and dump scheme to make quick money selling stock on the news of the announcement:
http://www.cultureghost.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2699
Such a scheme is critically dependent on a gullible press that simply repeats what press releases say, instead of doing enough research to determine the facts. I notified pretty much all the major filesharing community news sites of my arguments and factual evidence for the pump and dump scheme. Only one – p2pnet.com – ever bothered to report on the many red flags the “saie” raised.
It really is a shame that some shareholders got scammed in the process – and for every scammed shareholder who bought the stock after the press “reported” it was a “done” deal and so forth, someone on the other side of the deal made money. Who? I don’t know – but that’s the only interesting question at this point.
At the least, this whole episode has been a wake-up call for the gullibility of the journalists who failed so badly to report on the full picture. It’s not that they didn’t have access to the data – heck, I put it all into a post and emailed/posted links to that post far and wide. None of them wrote back to gather more data, question my analysis, etc. It was simply ignored.
Oh well. You know it’s bad when a non-journalist dilettante like me does a better job analyzing a story like this than do people who are supposed to write and research stories as a professional, paid career. Some folks, like Ernesto at TF, just got caught up in the hype of TPB – but others, I suspect, simply didn’t bother to listen to a diversity of analysis. Shame on them.
Fausty | http://www.cultureghost.org
Swedish cops are looking into that > http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86885/ggf-deal-gets-murkier-cops-suspect-insider-trading/