Suffering of a "nihilist": according to Kaur Kender, who earned a massive salary, nearly a million euros were flogged from her
Last year, the Estonian record was set in overweight. Or even one that could be entered in the Guinness Book of Records.
A little-known company bought a storybook and four black-and-white sketches of a man in scarf for just over a euro. He resold them at a price that would make you fall over.
€4.8 million.
This means that the mark-up was not the usual ten to fifteen percent, nor the lavish two times, the incredible ten times, let alone the unrealistic hundred or thousand times, but could be measured in millions!
Such a rate of return is reminiscent of the Vikinglotto jackpot.
However, miracles rarely happen in real life, and so this story, too, is not about a miracle, but about an exceptionally blatant fraud.
At the heart of the story is the team that created the hit game Disco Elysium. Last week, we informed readers about the tensions between them.
It turns out that this set is broadly divided into three.
The first is Kaur Kender, who was once described by the Ekspress as a noble asshole and a nihilist shithead. This was when Kender was running the website Nihilist.fm, was on trial for the obscene child rape article 'Untitled 12' and wanted to run for president, even though his website proclaimed: "The Republic of Estonia [get fucked]."
Kender did not become head of state, Nihilist's site was shut down, and the man was acquitted in court, mainly because he wrote his abomination abroad.
Kender then disappeared from the public eye for a while, and emerged as a talented businessman in connection with 'Disco Elysium'. During the making of the game, he acted as executive producer and marketing manager.
Businessman and rogue
The other party is Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov (civil name Sander Taal). They are the creative force behind "Disco Elysium".
Kurvitz invented the world and the main characters. He started working on them as a teenager and even dropped out of high school. He spent over 20 years developing the game. It is his life's work.
Kurvitza's right-hand man on this was Rostov, the project's artistic director. Two years ago, they were awarded the President's Young Cultural Leader Award for their work. Not to mention the numerous awards from the games industry.
Kender-Kurvitz-Rostov are partners in Zaum Studio, the company that created "Disco Elysium" and appear as the victims in this business case.
And now the third party.
Ilmar Kompus, known mainly through Sky radio and his real estate company, is named as the culprit. He is the director and largest shareholder of Zaum Studio.
But according to papers filed with the Harju County Court, Kompus was just a dummy. Instead, it was Tõnis Haavel who pulled the strings. A smooth-talking, smooth-talking ex-banker who was convicted of investment fraud in 2015 and received a seven-month suspended prison sentence. Haavel was also an executive producer.
Kompus and Haavel deny the charges.
Men, we have been deceived!
According to a ruling by the Harju County Court at the end of October and what Ekspress was told, the case went as follows.
Last summer, Margus Linnamäe, a major entrepreneur, left the ownership of Zaum Studio. He was involved in the creation of 'Disco Elysium' as a financier and was the studio's largest shareholder.
Kender argues that under the earlier agreement, the share belonging to Linnamäe was to be distributed among all shareholders.
However, the studio's articles of association allow the shareholders to sell the shares to each other as they see fit.
Kompus was able to do so, so that Linnamäe sold the entire stake to him.
Kurvitz and Rostov knew nothing about it. They were interested in making games. Financially, everything seemed to be fine. They were becoming millionaires.
It turned out to be a delusion, a beautiful fantasy.
They discovered what had happened five months later, completely by chance.
'Disco Elysium' was making millions of euros in profits and winning one prize after another. But Kurvitz and Rostov were knocked out of their leading positions in the middle of the party and the chart. They became ordinary writers and artists, and attitudes changed as if they were no longer full partners. At one point they remembered to look at the register of companies and wow! It turned out that control of the company had slipped into the hands of Kompus.
Last autumn, Kurvitz and Rostov started asking questions about what had happened, demanding documents and were given the boot. They were chased out of the company they made big and where they are still small shareholders.
Where did the millions come from to pay Linnamäe?
Mr Kurvitz and Mr Rostov told the public on Wednesday last week that, during their time as Linnamäe's majority shareholder, they were confident that the studio was in order and that shareholders were treated equally. That changed when Kompus's company took over as majority shareholder.
Kurvitz and Rostov argued that Kompus was using money that should have belonged to all the shareholders for his own purposes and was instead going to make a sequel to Disco Elysium.
But they had only recently heard how Kompus was making a mess.
Linnamäe was asking €4.5 million for his stake.
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.
Such behaviour is reminiscent of the famous scene in the science fiction film 'The Hotel of the Drowned Alpinist', where the villain played by Mikk Mikiver was attacked by his alien alter ego, and all the man could say afterwards was, 'I tied me up'. Me me! Understand?"
Kender sacked
Initially, Kender remained in the same camp as Kompus. He was paid handsomely. The accounts of the studio's British arm, Disco Elysium UK Ltd, show that in the financial year ending in the spring, Kender received €500 000.
But he, too, wondered what would happen next. Kompus was approached by suitors who wanted to buy Disco Elysium. These were big, well-known companies like Microsoft and Tencent.
They were tempted by the prospect of producing a sequel to the menu game. Amazon, which owns the streaming platform, was also attracted by the idea of making a TV series based on the game.
The smell of big money began to spread. Tens of millions of euros were being talked about.
But nothing came of the sale of the studio.
It may have been the intellectual property of the game, the rights to use the world and characters of Disco Elysium.
These rights are held by the British company Zaum UK, nicknamed Zuk.
The head of Zaum UK is Ilmar Kompus. He owns a fifth of the company. But it turns out that in the case of intellectual property, the deal can be blocked by Robert Kurvitz, the inventor of the game. The same cell who was shown the door...
This means that Kompus will not be able to freely sell "Disco Elysium" because Kurvitz could block the deal. At the same time, Kurvitz will not be able to make a sequel to his fictional game because the rights no longer belong to him, but to Zaum UK.
The situation is reminiscent of the well-known story of the crow on the tarred roof: if the beak is free, the tail is stuck, if the tail is free, the beak is stuck.
Kender's haggling over the future of the studio ended in the same way as with Kurvitz and Rostov. He was first sent on leave and then fired last week.
Kender did not leave the matter alone, but took the matter to court. He claimed that Kompus had cheated him out of €913 000. On 28 October, the Harju County Court seized the controlling stake in Zaum Studios, which belonged to Kompus, at the request of Kender's company.
Kender's lawyers argued that the seizure was necessary because otherwise Kompus would sell the studio and the money could end up in an offshore account, making it much more difficult to restore the situation or to compensate for the consequences. And this is not a theoretical risk. Negotiations with Amazon are already under way.
How Haavel was brought into play
Kaur Kender's lawsuit is not just against Ilmar Kompus and his company Tütreke. Tõnis Haavel has also been dragged into it.
Kender alleges that Kompus acted at the direction, instigation and with the assistance of Haavel.
Kompus's former involvement in the game was explained to the game's creative director with the story that Margus Linnamäe did not want to take risks alone. Creating a computer game is very expensive and Kurvitza's team had not made any before. The margin for error was pretty big, so it was worth sharing the risk.
Kompus became a small player alongside Linnamäe. Haavel soon joined the company. He was seen as Kompus' representative.
Haavel was busy working as a producer.
But at one point it was realised that his role was even more important. For a long time, the other shareholders believed that Yessirnosir Ltd, a British company owned by Zaum UK, the owner of the intellectual property rights to Disco Elysium, was owned by Kompus. But googling revealed that no, it is run by Anu Reiman. This lady is the life partner of Tõnis Haavel. The sailboat on which Haavel and Reiman are competing together is also called "Yes Sir No Siri".
Last spring, Kompus sent out an e-mail from the studio giving the impression that he owned Tütreke in tandem with Haavel.
Perhaps suspicions were beginning to circulate among other shareholders that Haavel was a secret owner.
In their view, Haavel does not want to show his property because otherwise it would be taken away from him due to debts. Kender explained to the court how Haavel is bankrupt and has to pay €11.2 million in compensation to businessmen who lost money in the famous Baku land-affair.
Haavel and his cronies lured millions of euros from the Estonian business elite in the run-up to last year's recession with promises to buy land near Baku. Azerbaijan seemed a solid investment, not Romania or Bulgaria. But the money disappeared.
At the time, it was said that Haavel's companies showed their involvement in the venture by taking some of the money from other investors out of the company and paying it in again as if it were their own. Again, the motto of the 'Drowned Mountaineer's Hotel' was repeated: 'I came upon myself.'
Kompus didn't believe he would be sued in court
When Ekspress contacted Ilmar Kompus in the middle of last week, the man said he had heard nothing about the lawsuit and the seizure of his shares! "I deeply doubt that there can be any lawsuits against me in Estonia that I have not been informed of by the courts," he said, adding that "I can confirm that I have never entered into any contract detrimental to Zaum Studio OÜ or done anything else that could give rise to a lawsuit."
With regard to the above-mentioned Pioneer One transaction, Kompus stated that Zaum Studio did not acquire the intellectual property from Tütreke OÜ or any other person, nor did it incur any costs (EUR 4,8 million or otherwise) to acquire it.
"At the same time, I do not consider it possible or appropriate to comment further in the press on the transactions and business relations between myself and persons associated with me. Such information contains trade secrets and personal data, the disclosure of which is not legal without the consent of the parties and may cause significant financial loss," said Kompus.
Did Haavel know nothing about the lawsuit?
"This is a completely absurd construction," declared Haavel, an ex-banker, adding that he had not seen the court order and could not comment on it.
Ekspress then sent them both the text of the order. On Friday, Ilmar Kompus also consulted it via the e-filing system.
Perhaps the information about what happened is highly contradictory. The confrontation over Estonia's most successful computer game of all time is becoming increasingly tense.
And it may well be handed over to criminal investigators. Mr Kurvitz and Mr Rostov announced last week that their lawyers believe the case has the hallmarks of a crime that could land them behind bars for up to three years and that they are considering going to the police.
Advocacy: Kompus and Haavel offered Kender a £20 000 commission to forget his claims
Olavi-Jüri Luik, a lawyer defending Kaur Kender's company Chromed Investing in the business dispute.
Initially, a dividend was to be paid from Zaum to all shareholders. With this money, the small shareholders were to buy out the majority shareholder - at least that is how Kompus and Haavel presented the situation to Kaur Kender.
How was the Pioneer One project involved?
Pioneer One was brought into the game by Kompus with the argument that it was in any case intellectual property developed by the company and allowed for a tax-efficient structure. The tax issues were handled exclusively by Kompus.
When did things get hot?
That summer, the issues became increasingly clear. Until finally, when Kender started asking direct questions, he was removed. In fact, when Kaur Kender learned of the unlawful removal of €4.8 million from Zaum, he was sent on compulsory leave on health grounds. Now, when the lawsuit was filed in court on 25 October, and the part of OÜ Tütrekes owned by Kompus/Haavel was seized, Kaur Kender was unlawfully dismissed by these persons.
Didn't just talking it out not work?
In the client's view, given Kompus and Haavel's previous pattern of behaviour - taking 4.8 million off the backs of the other shareholders, sacking those who had created a successful game, etc. - there is little hope of a gentlemanly resolution.
In the case of Mr Haavel, his 'history' of criminal convictions and the disgorgement of more than 10 million from him and the bankruptcy of his private bank cannot be forgotten.
The 'handwriting' of Kompus and Haavel is that they offered Kender £20,000 to waive all rights to defend his interests in court. After waiving their rights, they offered to negotiate whether Kender's share had any value. This in a situation where we are talking about a company worth tens of millions.
Why is Tõnis Haavel involved in the action as a tortfeasor?
It was an open secret in Zaum that Haavel was holding a disguised stake in Kompus' company. Haavel's shareholding is even reflected in e-mails sent by Kompus.
Presumably, this concealment of Haavel's shareholding was the result of a conviction and money order against him for investment fraud. Kompus and Haavel themselves should be better placed to explain why this was done.
In addition to Zaum's involvement, a client of mine has told me how Haavel explained internally that, like rich people do, he uses a family office headed by his life partner for other things.
Are Robert Kurvitz and Sander Taal about to file similar lawsuits as Kaur Kender?
The small shareholders have filed a demand for a general meeting to be convened with the aim of having Zaum Studio take Kompus to court. Such an action was initiated jointly by Kurvitz, Taal and Kender. At this general meeting, Kompus itself will not be allowed to vote.
