The man who said he would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legal service faced legal action when he was accused of trying to manipulate stock prices. Hans Pandeya was said to have made misleading statements in order to boost shares in his company, a situation that led the co-founder of Napster and the founder of the Grokster P2P service to testify against him. But now, with the court throwing out all but one of the charges against him, Pandeya is free to continue his business life.

During June 2009 a somewhat surprising story began to emerge.

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.