Sadly for GGF, none of the headlines in the last year have turned out to be good ones for the company. It has been followed by almost constant controversy.

Now, for the second time in just over a year, GGF faces bankruptcy. In common with last year’s close escape when a former employee requested court action against the company for unpaid debts, history is repeating itself.

A pair of companies, Kennicott AB and Hercora Trading Technology, say they are collectively owed 1.5 million kronor ($220,000). The amounts, 906,200 kronor and 567,600 kronor respectively, were loaned to GGF in August 2008 but the companies are yet to be repaid.

In an application to the district court the companies demand that GGF “is immediately placed in bankruptcy.”

According to a report, owner Hans Pandeya already has liabilities of more than 400,000 kronor ($58,800) registered with the bailiff and today Global Gaming Factory has recorded liabilities of 450,000 kronor ($66,200). The company has filed no financial reports for 2009.

In filings, Pandeya places much of the blame for the current position on the failure to acquire The Pirate Bay last year.

In 2009, GGF was kicked off Swedish stock market Aktietorget following several serious violations which solicited comments that the company had a casual approach to disclosure requirements which misled the market.

But despite all the setbacks and serious lack of finances, Hans Pandeya continues to pursue his dream of owning a torrent site.

In August this year he approached Demonoid with a buyout offer, which was rejected.

Then in September, Winnipeg-based law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP put in offers to acquire several of the largest BitTorrent sites on behalf of an unnamed client. All roads pointed back to Pandeya. These offers were also rejected.

TorrentFreak has learned that just two weeks ago Pandeya made an offer to one of the most prominent torrent sites. No prizes for guessing what the response was.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In recent history quite a few medium-sized torrent sites have changed owners, but these were all deals done within the torrent community, none were conducted in the open.

The first time that an outsider went public with plans to buy a torrent site was last year when Global Gaming Factory (GGF) made a $7.8 million offer for The Pirate Bay, and a $25 million offer to buy Mininova. GGF planned to legalize the sites and turn them into media portals where movies and music would be sold with approval from copyright holders.

Most readers probably recall that the deals with the two largest torrent sites at the time didn’t go through due to funding issues. However, last month GGF CEO Hans Pandeya popped up again, this time with an offer for the largest semi-private BitTorrent community Demonoid. Apparently, he had not yet abandoned his plans.

Demonoid’s owner told TorrentFreak that he was not interested in anything GGF had to offer, so Pandeya had to target other sites to carry out his plans. Interestingly enough, a few days after Demonoid rejected Pandeya’s offer, the Canadian law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP contacted several other larger torrent sites with similar offers.

In their correspondence the solicitors claim to be working for a U.S. based corporation that is interested in acquiring the assets of the sites in question. The identity of the potential buyer is not disclosed, but considering the timing it wouldn’t be strange if it turned out to be GGF CEO Hans Pandeya.

Torrent sites don’t often get offers from external parties, except the ones from GGF we discussed above. If Pandeya is indeed behind the offer, it would make sense for him to make his approach using the cover of a law firm due to the bad reputation he has built up among torrent site owners.

The torrent sites that have been approached prefer not to be named, but they are among the most visited on the Internet, which is in line with Pandeya’s plans. The only thing that’s different this time is the money being offered. Unlike the millions of dollars that were thrown around previously, the current offers are at the lower end of the scale.

None of the torrent sites that were contacted are interested in selling, so it is likely that we might never know the truth about the mysterious buyer or if he has connections to GGF.

Hans Pandeya was contacted for a comment, but didn’t want to respond on the record.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A few months after the announcement the deal eventually bounced. Although GGF’s shareholders agreed to the acquisition, the company failed to come up with the required $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline for the acquisition eventually passed without an official response from the company.

Many thought that the company had abandoned its BitTorrent plans for good, but behind the scenes it was preparing for a second shockwave. In the last month GGF CEO Hans Pandeya has been continuing his plans to acquire one or more torrent sites to start an industry approved entertainment platform. One of the prime targets for a takeover at the moment is the popular BitTorrent site Demonoid, but other sites have been approached as well.

“I have finally managed to get some funds in place and want to acquire Demonoid and some other sites to execute my plans,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak. “I lost a year and a fortune due to Aktietorget’s [the equity marketplace] acrobatics during my attempt to acquire The Pirate Bay in 2009 but I think it is still not too late to acquire and convert torrent sites.”

Whether Demonoid is open for an acquisition by GGF remains to be seen. The site’s owner has not commented on the proposal yet but Pandeya hopes there will be a favorable response to his plans.

It has never been a secret that GGF was interested in buying more than one torrent site to build its entertainment empire. Last year, when all eyes were pointed at GGF’s takeover of The Pirate Bay, the company also put in a 20 million euro behind-the-scenes offer for fellow BitTorrent site Mininova. Even today, Pandeya is still interested in reactivating the deal with The Pirate Bay.

“The Pirate Bay and Isohunt are on my Most Wanted list of course but I have to take one step at a time. I hope it is going to work this time. There is a positive attitude towards out-of-the-box thinking in the US which seems to be essential for this project so keep your fingers crossed.”

It is questionable how realistic Pandeya’s most wanted list is in terms of takeover potential. TorrentFreak contacted representatives of The Pirate Bay and isoHunt who both assured us that they are not interested in a deal with GGF at the moment, not least because they doubt Pandeya actually has any money to splash around.

The owner of Demonoid, the prime target of GGF at the moment, was contacted for a comment but we haven’t heard back at the time of publication. Despite all the skepticism, Pandeya firmly believes in his plans to transform torrent sites into ‘legal’ music and movie stores, and there is little doubt that this won’t be the last we hear of it.

“My plan is doable,” Pandeya said.

Update: Demonoid’s owner got back to us. We were told that he has no intention to sell the site to Global Gaming Factory. This means that Pandeya has to find another candidate to carry out his plans. Demonoid will remain as it is.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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 deny that a contract was already signed on their part. 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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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), half of which would be paid in shares.

After several anonymous investors decided to pull out of the deal the company was faced with a problem. To get the required funds in place GGF’s shareholders – including the CEO who holds more than half of the shares – decided to finance the acquisition themselves.

But today, after a month has gone by and the deadline for the sale has passed, there is no joyful press release from the company, just silence.

To get the latest information about the upcoming deadline, TorrentFreak contacted GGF’s CEO Hans Pandeya yesterday. However, thus far we haven’t received any response and his phone has been switched off.

In addition to these dark signs, sources close to Resevella – the company selling The Pirate Bay – could not confirm that the promised money had been transferred or that an arrangement had been made to deliver ‘the goods’.

Based on these observations we think it’s safe to conclude that The Pirate Bay will not be sold to GGF, something that’s not really that much of a surprise considering all the financial troubles the company and its CEO have, not to mention the fact that GGF was recently thrown off the Swedish Stock exchange.

So what’s next? We assume that Hans Pandeya will soon offer an explanation for his failure to transfer the funds. In the meantime, the people involved in the Pirate Bay will probably be looking for a new buyer, perhaps one that will actually be able to pay for the site.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The debt should have been paid off in July but GGF failed to do so. In a response Sellstrom has now submitted a request for GGF’s bankruptcy in the Stockholm District Court which states that “the debtor can not legally pay its debts, and this incapacity can not be regarded as temporary.”

“This is just standard procedure and the next step is for GGF to pay or explain why not and to show that they are indeed not bankrupt,” Sellstrom told TorrentFreak in a comment.

“The Pandeya family was served at breakfast on August 21. But like Bagdad Bob he is now denying that he knew anything about it. The debt is mentioned in the annual report and Hans [GGF's CEO] even commented to Cnet about the filing,” he added.

Sellstrom used to be a GGF board member but left the company after he doubted its future plans for The Pirate Bay. “I did not believe in the strategy,” he told TorrentFreak. On top of that Sellstrom says that Pandeya refused to share financial reports with him at the time.

Over the past weeks several (former) GGF partners including the technology provider Peerialism and business partner Wayne Rosso have complained about outstanding debts and liquidity issues. In addition, GGF was removed from the Swedish stock exchange.

This bankruptcy request is yet another nail in the coffin for the Pirate Bay deal. The deadline will expire in a few days, and thus far there has been no confirmation from Pirate Bay’s owners that they have received any of the promised money.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Those uncertainties seemed to fade a little recently when the company’s shareholders agreed on the deal two weeks ago. However, some of the shareholders decided to pay the money needed to make the sale from their own pockets after several investors walked away, and thus far nothing has been paid.

Because the company failed to provide evidence that the funds were in place, trading in GGF stock was stopped by equity marketplace ‘Aktietorget’ in August, which caused a problem with the acquisition since half of the payment for The Pirate Bay is set to be made in shares.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya said at the time he was confident that trading would resume soon since it was all one big misunderstanding. However, today news broke indicating it won’t resume, as Aktietorget has decided to kick GGF off the Swedish stock market.

“The alleged infringements have been serious. They give a systematic impression of a lack of accountability and of an almost casual and unsuspecting approach to the disclosure requirements,” AktieTorget commented on their decision to remove the company from the stock exchange.

“The Aktietorget board regrets that the company has misled the market through its lack of disclosure, which prompted a number of investors to do business they probably would not have done if they were properly informed,” they add.

Without shares to trade the company suddenly has to raise twice as much money, which seems to be an impossible task without any outside investors and with the company’s CEO in personal financial trouble. All this makes the sale of The Pirate Bay yet more uncertain.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya was not available for comment and representatives of The Pirate Bay could not be reached. If we receive a response from either of them we will update the article accordingly.

Update: Pandeya responded to the news and says the deal is still on.

“GGFs managed to get enough investors to pay the entire amount in cash, i.e. 60m Swedish kroner and the seller faxed confirmation of acceptance to Aktietorget. We even had a clause that if investors dropped out, I would put the balance and if I could not, I have pledged my GGF shares as security. The transaction is guaranteed, It cannot be stopped,” Pandeya explained.

“I liked the stunt with the MC, car and boat. Gives the impression I am broke. Well, I provided security worth three times the amount to the debt agency – and they agreed. However, they were keen to take the stuff that makes spectacular pics to entertaining stories and stole my boat after our agreement,” he added.

“we will be closing the deal within the next two weeks,” Pandeya concluded.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today, GGF shared its plans with the shareholders, who all decided in favor of the deal.

After several investors decided to pull out, GGF’s shareholders – including the CEO who holds more than half of the shares – will finance the acquisition themselves.

After the domain has been transferred to GGF, the new Pirate Bay will be transformed into a pay site charging users for access. To please the entertainment industries, GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the ‘illegal’ torrents or have them removed from the site.

How pleased the copyright holders will be with this new legalization plan is seriously up for debate – Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has already stated that it is insufficient.

There are currently no licensing agreements in place with the entertainment industry, but despite the criticism GGF hopes to partner with most of the major movie studios and record labels within a year.

In addition to the Pirate Bay acquisition, GGF also confirmed that it will buy the file-sharing technology company Peerialism for 100 million Swedish kroner. Peerialism will provide core technology for the new Pirate Bay.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite all the negative media coverage, GGF CEO Hans Pandeya is confident that the deal will go through. The investors that are left are existing shareholders of GGF and their names are not published but known by the company’s management.

The equity marketplace Aktietorget meanwhile claims it has still not been provided with evidence showing the funding for the acquisition is in place, and has decided to extend the shut down in trading of GGF’s stock.

Today, GGF’s shareholders will discuss the buyout of the Pirate Bay and the plans for the site, before they give the green light or decide to vote against it. After the shareholders meeting GGF will host a press-conference to discuss the outcome and inform the public on what steps they will take next.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya told TorrentFreak that they have been working on a new deal with at least one other major BitTorrent site. However, it will be difficult enough to successfully convert The Pirate Bay into a site where both users and the copyright holders are kept happy, before moving on to other sites.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Earlier today reports surfaced in which it became clear that Johan Sellstrom, former director and board member of GGF, is owed hundreds of thousands of dollars by Pandeya. As a result, trading in GGF’s stock was stopped immediately by equity marketplace Aktietorget.

Sellstrom told TorrentFreak that Pandeya used $200,000 of his money to buy GGF shares in 2006 and 2007, but has yet so see any of the money back. “I want that cash back,” Sellstrom said, adding that Pandeya owes him another $650,000 privately.

Sellstrom has only recently left GGF, and he cites the company’s future plans for The Pirate Bay as one of the main reasons. “I did not believe in the strategy,” he told TorrentFreak. On top of that Sellstrom says that Pandeya refused to share economic reports with him.

In addition to the troubles surrounding Sellstrom’s loan, one its technology partners, Peerialism, is also waiting for money from GGF. Peerialism is supposed to provide the new Pirate Bay with a unique technology that would allow users to share more efficiently.

But Johan Ljungberg, CEO of Peerialism, told CNET News that Pandeya is not keeping his promises. Peerialism has been hired to start working on the new technology for the site, and was promised half of the money upfront.

“That was two months ago but he hasn’t paid anything,” Ljungberg said. “We have his signature on the contract, but he hasn’t paid and we haven’t done the work.”

Besides failing to pay the people that were supposed to provide the new Pirate Bay with key technology, Ljungberg said that Pandeya also failed to inform Peerialism about the company’s future plans and financial position.

“From the beginning we asked to see a business plan, the names of his investors, or to see some (technical specifications),” Ljungberg said. “We still haven’t heard a thing…the question marks are growing bigger by the day. We’re not quite comfortable with the situation. We had really high hopes and ambitions for our technology but I’m not sure if this is the right home for it.”

The doubts and uncertainties pointed out by former GGF director Sellstrom and Peerialism’s Ljungberg don’t do the image of GGF much good, and the shareholders and potential entertainment industry partners may become skeptical too.

Aside from the lack of payments described earlier, the equity marketplace Aktietorget is also uncertain that GGF actually has the funding in place to make the Pirate Bay acquisition

Aktietorget says it has no evidence of any funding apart from a press release by GGF. They wanted to know more so they summoned Pandeya, who got someone on a phone saying he is with an investment bank. The man claimed that the funding is indeed in place, however, trading will be halted until they get written confirmation as well as the identity of the investors.

These recent developments will certainly raise some eyebrows with the shareholders. A smooth acquisition of the Pirate Bay seems to be nearly impossible. Despite all the allegations, Pandeya remains confident and told TorrentFreak: “Some people’s attempts to damage the deal have escalated, but it is too late to stop the acquisition.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.