When lawyer Ernst-Jan Louwers showed up in a Dutch court this week to defend the three Pirate Bay administrators, he swore that none of the three men in fact owned the site, having got rid of it in a shady 2006 transaction. How shady? Louwers told the judge that he could produce literally no piece of evidence that the site had even been sold at all—no contract, no bank transfer, no nothing.

The Pirate Bay admins have long said that the site is actually controlled by a mysterious company called Reservella, based in the Seychelles islands. As for who controls Reservella, the admins say they have no idea—and frankly don't care.

But Dutch antipiracy group BREIN says that it knows who controls Reservella, and it has the document to prove it: Fredrik Neij, one of the three Pirate Bay admins.

Check the credit report



The revelation was made during a Dutch trial this week seeking to block access to The Pirate Bay from within the Netherlands. BREIN submitted as evidence a credit report from Experian (PDF), one of the major credit rating agencies, which listed Neij as the CEO of Reservella. The document added, "Although the Subject Business is legally registered, it is registered in a tax haven country by overseas owners, and has no operational office, nor employees." The "maximum recommended credit" that should be extended to the company was, not surprisingly, "None."

Peter Sunde

Pirate Bay admin and spokesperson Peter Sunde quickly took to his blog, claiming that Neij had nothing to do with Reservella's owners. Furthermore, he suspected a forgery.

"It is very clear to me what has happened," he wrote. "My well educated, well established, well founded hunch is that BREIN realized that they were going to lose hard and in order to win, they themselves had to create false evidence and hand that over to the court!"

As if that wasn't enough, Sunde said that "I am right now filing criminal charges against both [BREIN boss] Tim Kuik personally as well as BREIN to the Dutch police. I consider what they have done as criminal. Much more severe than any 'aiding with potential copyright infringement' could ever be. The charges will be forgery (the document is stated to come from a third party and used as evidence in a court of law) and fraud (by gaining from this, both monetarily as well as politically)."



Flickr user Tim Kuik of BREINFlickr user boklm

So what's going on here? We contacted Kuik, who sounds like a man who has had it with The Pirate Bay's antics. "If Sunde will in fact file a criminal complaint, he will in fact wilfully make a false complaint," he told Ars. "Although I find it not unusual for Mr. Sunde to make false statements and allegations, this would be another and even more reproachable low after his previous misguided criminal complaint against me which also led to nothing." (Sunde also went after Kuik a few weeks back over a separate legal issue.)

In any event, BREIN says it had nothing to do with the report, which came from Experian, and that it was only using the document in an attempt to have the judge join the (separate) trials against The Pirate Bay admins and against Reservella. The judge refused, and Kuik says that the report "therefore does not play a role in the court case."

De facto control

But even if BREIN can't trace the paper trail, it says that Sunde, Neij, and Gottfrid Warg are "taking actual responsibility for the site" regardless of its owner. They therefore should bear responsibility and are the "de facto" site operators. And Kuik noted that the court case this week did result in the admission from Louwers that "Neij and Warg had been owners of The Pirate Bay and contended they had transferred the ownership 'some time in 2006.' He could not say to whom and could not submit any transaction document."

The Pirate Bay has actually said this for some time. Sunde has previously told Ars that the site was offloaded back in 2006, but not to Reservella. Instead, ownership was transferred to an entity that he refuses to name, which then sold it to Reservella. We contacted Sunde to ask whether there was not some document or money trail proving any of this, something that would simply put an end to the continued claims that the Pirate Bay admins are playing an ownership shell game of some kind.

Sunde tells Ars that there is no such document or money trail because, in 2006, the site was "given away for free." Who was it given to? "This is being kept confidential because the other party would otherwise try to sue more people, of course." But it's Sunde's understanding that no documents were signed at the time.

Suspicion has long centered on Neij because his name shows up on The Pirate Bay's WHOIS information as the contact (Reservella is listed as the owner). The new document from Experian seems to confirm that Neij was in fact linked with Reservella—so we asked him for an explanation.

Neij tells Ars that he is "listed as a contact for the domain, where they have chosen to add their company name as well. I can only assume it has something to do with the upcoming sale. As with most customers that have my name as proxy, I can not edit the WHOIS information, because they still have the domains in their registrar accounts for which I don't have access. They are allowed to use my name in the whois as long as they are costumers of [Neij's business] DCP Networks."

So Neij's name was simply plugged into the WHOIS information by the person who currently controls the domain; this also seems to be a possible explanation for the credit report information as well. Whoever Reservella is, he or she wants to remain well hidden.

Ars has received anonymous information on the company, pegging it to a specific individual who lives in the Seychelles (itself an interesting claim, since the Seychelles is a hub for offshore companies and foreign ownership was assumed to be more likely). The name "Reservella" is alleged to come from a Seychelles luxury hotel called "La Reserve." Ars has been unable to confirm either piece of information, though this same source was correct that the company had been registered by the Mayfair Trust Group Limited in the Seychelles city of Victoria.

Mayfair Trust refused to provide any contact information for Reservella, but did confirm that it forwarded the e-mail to "our client and they will respond directly to your query." No one from Reservella replied, and no one from the site showed up in the Dutch court this week.

Sunde told us a few weeks ago, "One thing you need to know when it comes to Reservella is that _it's not us_. We separated the TPB ownership long time ago to protect ourselves and the site. That means that it's deliberately out of our hands on how that part is handled. We signed the NDAs in order to be able to take part in some of the discussions with [Global Gaming Factory], such as demanding for instance that the user data is safe, it can't be handed over etc etc. That was part of the deal when TPB was handed over—an eventual sale in the future had to be on terms that the crew could be OK with."

Although the content industries continue to charge that the admins have been stashing huge wads of cash in secret bank accounts, Sunde is adamant that the only benefit he accrues from working on the site is "helping out a political cause Since the money [from a sale] will in the end be transferred to a fund, no one will benefit from this economically. It's building muscles for a cause."

But, while the ownership mystery continues, BREIN hopes to proceed against the site administrators and will leave the question of Reservella's ownership for another day. To Kuik, it's just not enough to sign some mysterious papers, say that you no longer own the site, and then continue to operate as you have always done; if you want to avoid liability, stop doing the activity in question.