https://pastebin.com/R37fXi4p An English translation to the article.

    • Madcat [any]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      yes it's good.

      he bought a short story and 4 sketches for £1 and them resold them for €4.8 million to buy out ZA/UM shareholders. his shares have been frozen in the court case currently.

      According to Kender's lawyers, Kompus's company Tütreke acquired the four sketches mentioned above and some talk about them in order to raise the money. This was described as intellectual property for the future computer game Pioneer One.

      Kompus's company paid a total of one pound sterling, or just over a euro, for the sketches and resold them to Zaum Studio for €4.8 million.

      So millions were pumped out of the studio to buy a stake in the same studio.

      • FourteenEyes [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        This is... remarkably similar to what happens in the Ultraliberal visionquest. Buying Cindy's art for a Real and selling it to the Mega-Rich Light-Bending Guy to get a massive Net Worth

        • ssjmarx [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I haven't yet discounted the possibility that this entire story is an avante garde marketing scheme for the next game.

      • AllCatsAreBeautiful [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I do not understand the structure of this illegal deal. So how does him selling sketches to ZA/UM buy out the shareholders?

        • Madcat [any]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          wait sorry i said no money actually left or went in to ZA/UM but i think that's wrong. I guess the money was just taken right out of ZA/UM and put into Margus Linnamäe's hands.

        • Madcat [any]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          From what I understand.

          The largest shareholder of ZA/UM at the time, Margus Linnamäe, left the company. The earliest agreement was for his shares to be distributed among the shareholders when he left. But, apparently "the studio's articles of association allow the shareholders to sell the shares to each other as they see fit" so Linnamäe sold his shares to Ilmar Kompus letting him become the majority shareholder.

          The problem is where he got that money to buy the shares from Linnamäe. Kompus's company "Tütreke" got the four sketches from ZA/UM for what's described as "intellectual property for the future computer game Pioneer One". The company got them for £1, then they were resold to ZA/UM for €4.8 million. That was the money Ilmar Kompus used to buy the shares from Margus Linnamäe.

          from the article:

          So millions were pumped out of the studio to buy a stake in the same studio.

          So no money actually left or went into ZA/UM it was just swapped hands between a few people leaving Ilmar Kompus as the "director and largest shareholder of Zaum Studio". No idea who he is but the article says he's "known mainly through Sky radio and his real estate company".

          That's the alleged fraud. Sorry if my explanation is bad or hard to follow but that's what I think's going on.