The Pirate Bay would be sold for $7.8 million, turned into a legal site, and the whole deal would be completed within a couple of months.

The urgency of the announcement and apparent imminent closure of the deal was a cause for alarm, with the file-sharing community voicing concern over what would happen to the site and how would that affect its users. Hans Pandeya, at the time CEO of Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), the company set to buy TPB, spoke out to settle the nerves.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” he announced to a somewhat skeptical audience.

Interest in the deal was massive and as a result GGF shares went through the roof, up at least 155% on the first day. The ride continued, with new announcements on the progress of the deal issued on a regular basis, keeping GGF, Hans Pandeya and of course The Pirate Bay in the headlines.

Things didn’t go to plan though and as the weeks passed it looked more and more likely that the deal would not complete, despite Hans Pandeya saying he had enough cash to pull it off.

In August 2009 things went from bad to worse. Facing a large unpaid tax bill, Pandeya’s car and motorcycle were seized. GGF finally collapsed last February.

Despite the Pirate Bay deal being long dead, problems for Pandeya remained. Swedish prosecutors said that Pandeya had been charged with “gross swindle” after he allegedly “provided misleading information to affect the price of [GGF's] shares in press releases.”

According to The Verge, two well-known individuals in the file-sharing space recently gave evidence against Pandeya in the case. The first was Wayne Rosso, the former president of the file-sharing platform Grokster who worked with Pandeya briefly on the Pirate Bay deal. The other was Napster co-founder Sean Fanning who according to Pandeya tried to buy The Pirate Bay.

Now, four years on, the affair has finally come to a close. This week a Stockholm District Court found that Pandeya’s claim that he had the finances in place to buy The Pirate Bay was premature. The judge handed the Swedish businessman a seven month suspended sentence and ordered him to complete 180 hours community service.

Speaking with TorrentFreak this morning, Hans Pandeya and his lawyer Per E Samuelsson said that only one minor charge was upheld and the rest were dismissed.

“We won almost everything,” Samuelsson explained. “The only thing which the court thought was wrong was that Pandeya stated too early that the financing was in place. But that was regarded as a minor mistake and one of the judges wanted to aquit Pandeya from that too.”

“It is important to state that the court did not believe the testimonies from John Fanning and Wayne Rosso,” Samuelsson added.

The lawyer noted that Pandeya received only probation, so may continue to work as a businessman, something Pandeya is clearly pleased about.

“It is a relief that I have been cleared of all accusations and can continue to work on my dream,” Pandeya told us.

The option of an appeal against the single charge is an option, but Samuelsson says that no decision has yet been made.

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

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 tow truck took away Pandeya’s car, which we can now reveal was a rather nice BMW 745iA, and his Harley Davidson. The tax authorities valued the car at 150,000 kronor ($20,800) and the motorcycle at 40,000 kronor ($5,550) so his tax debt still wasn’t cleared, not by a long way.

The bailiffs needed to find more funds but it was reported in the Swedish media that they were unable to find any bank accounts. But the trail didn’t go cold.

Following an anonymous tip-off, bailiffs homed in on the Royal Motorboat Club in Stockholm and there they found it – not a torrent galleon with cannons either side, a huge sail and overflowing with pirates, but Hans Pandeya’s luxury boat.

According to the bayliffs who spoke with Realtid.se, unless Pandeya comes up with the money, the authorities will sell the cruiser at auction within the next two months. At the moment they say it’s worth around 450,000 kronor ($62,400), although that figure could be revised. Have a look round, you might like to offer more;

That still leaves a 142,000 kronor tax debt, so who knows what the authorities will seize next.

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

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

TorrentFreak has confirmation from one of the major torrent sites that they have been approached by GGF. The owner of the site – who prefers to remain anonymous – told us that the contact was informal and that no deals have been closed thus far.

This isn’t the first time a company has targeted torrent sites in the hope of building a large network of traffic and potential customers. Three years ago Searching.com came up with a similar idea, and although they managed to get some advertising partnerships, none of the torrent sites were taken over at the time.

Things will be different this time around though. According to Hans Pandeya there are plenty of investors who are willing to partner with the company, and the entertainment industry is also following the latest developments with great interest.

The real problem for GGF is one of a different nature. They can buy dozens of sites and cut deals with all the big movie studios and record labels, but they have to find a way to keep downloading free, or at least dirt cheap. If they can’t pull this off, their newly acquired userbase will flock to the next torrent site in a snap.

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