[Infowarrior] - Pirate Bay Buyer Offered Millions to Mininova

[Richard Forno]

Pirate Bay Buyer Offered Millions to Mininova
Written by Ernesto on March 03, 2010
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-buyer-offered-millions-to-mininova-100303/

Global Gaming Factory’s planned acquisition of The Pirate Bay last  
summer surprised BitTorrent’s friends and foes alike. But The Pirate  
Bay was not the only site the company was after. Tt also put in a  
massive 20 million euro offer for fellow BitTorrent site Mininova.

When GGF announced that it would take over The Pirate Bay, the company  
bombarded the press with optimistic plans which indicated the site  
would become the largest online media store. The attention later  
shifted to the troublesome financial position of its CEO, but all  
along the company had confidence in its plans for the new and ‘legal’  
Pirate Bay.

This fall, however, it all turned out too good to be true. After GGF’s  
shareholders agreed to acquire the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker,  
the company had a month to come up with the proposed $7.8m (SEK 60  
million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline passed  
without an official response from the company.

 From the moment it was announced the planned Pirate Bay acquisition  
had been surrounded by controversy. However, behind the scenes GGF CEO  
Hans Pandeya was drafting an even bigger deal with BitTorrent’s number  
one indexer at the time – Mininova.

“We will try to buy as many torrent sites as possible,” Pandeya told  
TorrentFreak back in August. In common with their plans for The Pirate  
Bay, GGF hoped to turn these sites into large media stores where users  
could download content with the full permission of copyright holders.

Little information has been made public about the “other” sites  
Pandeya was aiming at and how serious this interest was. Unlike all  
the other plans and deals that leaked out previously, no other torrent  
site has been publicly connected to GGF, until today where Pandeya’s  
connection to Mininova was exposed.

TorrentFreak has learned that GGF and Mininova already finalized a  
contract last summer to sell the torrent index for no less than 20  
million Euros. This deal and the amount have been confirmed by several  
independent sources close to Mininova and GGF. One of the sources who  
confirmed the Mininova buyout plans was Hans Pandeya himself.

One of our sources further said that the deal had already been signed  
off by Mininova, and that GGF would wait for the verdict in Mininova’s  
appeal with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This verdict was due  
one day before the GGF shareholders were set to give the green light  
on the Pirate Bay deal.

A positive outcome for Mininova in that case would have certainly made  
the site a valuable asset, but as we now know Mininova lost in court  
and was forced to proactively filter titles and remove a great number  
of infringing, and indeed non-infringing torrents to ensure absolute  
compliance.

Sources from within Mininova have confirmed the existence of the 20  
million euro acquisition offer but denied that the contract was  
already signed. Instead, Mininova would have liked to see some proof  
that GGF could pay the proposed sum before signing.

Although there seems to be some disagreement on the details, there is  
no doubt that GGF had set course to get the two major BitTorrent sites  
in possession. In fact, Mininova was brought in during licensing  
negotiations with several senior executives at one of the major record  
labels.

During a meeting with the label in London, Pandeya was assisted by his  
short-lived business partner Wayne Rosso. In the meeting the  
executives were asking for some traffic metrics and out of the blue  
and to  the surprise of Rosso, Pandeya picked up his mobile phone and  
rang a Dutch number, claiming that it was a “company of his” close to  
Amsterdam that could provide some insight into the traffic question.

The person on the other end of the line provided some information to  
the label execs and plans were made to head over to The Netherlands to  
do some due diligence. When Rosso later asked Pandeya about this  
mysterious Dutch company Pandeya revealed that it was in fact Mininova.

“It’s Mininova. I’m going to buy Mininova too and eliminate all the  
competition,” Pandeya told Rosso explaining the Dutch connection.

At the time of this meeting the contract was already drafted but not  
signed by both parties. If it would have gone through GGF would have  
had the option to buy out the two largest BitTorrent sites online. Of  
course we now know that the deal didn’t go though. GGF didn’t have the  
money and Mininova might not have been worth it after the negative  
verdict in their case against BREIN.

In the months that followed Mininova removed over a million torrent  
files making it a less lucrative asset for Pandeya. On the other hand  
it also shows that a torrent site with only “authorized” content will  
quickly lose most of its regular visitors. Despite this knowledge and  
all the failed attempts to pull investors in, Pandeya said a few days  
ago that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.

“I have a lot of secret plans I’m working on,” he warned.