https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/mindgeek-porn-monopoly-...

It's financing has always been questionable.

>MindGeek itself has something of a checkered past. In 2009, the Secret Service seized $6.4 million from bank accounts controlled by Mansef, a company founded by Stephane Manos and Ouissam Youssef, the assets of which Mansef later sold to German tech investor Fabian Thylmann, who made them part of a company he owned called Manwin. Manwin would later become MindGeek.* (Of the $6.4 million that was seized, $4.15 million was later released pursuant to a settlement with the federal government.)* In April 2011, Manwin quietly secured a $362 million loan from Wall Street firm Colbeck Capital, founded by former Goldman Sachs employees Jason Colodne and Jason Beckman. (Goldman Sachs distanced themselves from the two.) Colbeck’s funds were in turn secured from other firms including the troubled Fortress Capital, masking the Manwin association. Having used the loan to continue to acquire tube sites and content producers, Thylman was then extradited from Belgium to Germany in 2012 for tax evasion on Manwin’s profits. In late 2013, Thylman was bought out by current CEO Ferras Antoon and COO David Tassillo, longtime players within the company, who now control operations from Montreal. (Manwin’s name was changed to Mindgeek in 2013.)

And their business model was basically pirating their own content, that they produced, so they didnt have to pay the people in production.

>Even content producers that MindGeek owns have trouble getting their movies off MindGeek’s tube sites. The result has been a vampiric ecosystem: MindGeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek, which makes money off of the tube ads that does not go to anyone involved in the production side.