Tiger Telematics - Organised Crime Links

Organised Crime Links

In October 2005, shortly after Gizmondo was released in America, a Swedish yellow-page paper printed a story linking Stefan Eriksson and two other Swedish Gizmondo Europe executives to the Swedish crime ring "Uppsalamaffian" (Uppsala Mafia.) The paper investigated a six months' loss of 200 million dollars, exhibiting large payouts to later bankrupt entities. Further, the trio's felonious history was revealed, such as Eriksson's 10-year prison sentences in 1993/94, for, among other things, conspiracy to pass counterfeit currency and attempted fraud, and the fact that Johan Enander was wanted by the Swedish police. In light of these findings, Eriksson and others resigned. One of those resignations came from Carl Freer, the chairman of the board and a director, who co-owned with Eriksson Northern Lights Software Limited. (Freer had previously sold luxury cars in France, Germany and the U.K., some of which turned out to have been stolen. In an interview for Realtid.se he claimed that he had no knowledge about that, and that it back then was very hard to verify if a car bought from another country was stolen or not. At one point, he stopped a check to a German seller since he suspected him of having delivered a stolen car, not knowing that it was a crime in Germany to stop a check once you had accepted delivery.) Northern Lights was paid a large sum of money to create Chicane and Colors, two Gizmondo games that were actually developed by Gizmondo Europe itself. Freer paid the money back to Gizmondo in order to stop an investigation into the matter. The Gizmondo company itself denied knowing anything about Eriksson's past.

In addition, Gizmondo paid $4m to Games Factory Publishing for nineteen concept games on the handheld, including a game called Typing Tutor, despite having no keyboard peripheral, $5.9m to Electronic Arts to port its SSX and FIFA games and $3.5m to Northern Lights to develop Colors (an urban gang warfare first-person perspective shooter) and Chicane (a Formula One racing game being developed exclusively for Gizmondo) which was in fact developed by other Indie Studios.

Around March 2005, US-based Tiger Telematics bought UK stock market-listed games developer Warthog for almost 500,000 Tiger shares and $1.13m in cash—altogether worth $8.1m. Acquiring all of Warthog's operating subsidiaries, along with the group's debts, and Warthog's CEO, Ashley Hall, COO Steven Law and CFO Simon Elms, to become Tiger employees. Warthog's team also has close ties with key games publishers and game franchise owners.