I was wrong, Famous Four bosses WERE kicked out

Famous Four Media’s portfolio of gTLDs is under new management after an investor rebellion, contrary to what I speculated earlier this week.
FFM’s former stable, which includes the likes of .men and .science, is now being managed by a company calling itself GRS Domains, but this new company has absolutely nothing to do with FFM’s former management.
That’s according to Robert Maroney, founder of Connecticut-based Engineers Gate Investments, which is a shareholder of ultimate portfolio owner Domain Venture Partners.
Maroney got in touch with DI yesterday to explain some of what has recently happened to the ownership and management of the 16 high-volume new gTLDs.
Back in June I speculated based on the quite limited available information that FFM might be bankrupt.
On Tuesday, after GRS Domains announced a relaunch and a rejection of its previous volume-heavy, spam-friendly business plan, I speculated based on slightly more information that management had repurchased the TLD assets after investors forced it into administration.
I was wrong on both counts, according to Maroney. What actually happened is more akin to an investor takeover.
Maroney said he “engineered” the ouster of FFM and its two shareholders/managers, Iain Roache and Geir Rasmussen, after Roache attempted to close down DVP.
DVP is basically a collection of private and institutional investors (brought in by Roache and others) from around the world which, based on the available evidence, have little or no connection to the domain name industry.
It’s a matter of public record that each gTLD contract is owned by a distinct Gibraltar-based shell company — dot Bid Limited owns the ICANN rights to run .bid for example — and that Domain Venture Partners owns these companies.
I’ve previously reported that Famous Four was also owned by DVP, but Maroney said that this was never the case. It was owned 80-20 by Roache and Rasmussen and contracted by DVP to manage the 16 gTLDs.
The affiliated registrar AlpNames, which has been responsible for a very large portion of registrations in the portfolio, had the same ownership structure as FFM and was never directly connected to DVP, Maroney said.
Following a court battle, GRS Domains has replaced FFM as the registry manager.
GRS is owned by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and is currently being managed by court-appointed administrator Edgar Lavarello, a Gibraltar-based accountant at PwC.
Maroney did not want to get into the detailed specifics about what caused the investor revolt, but did say that shareholders were unhappy with how FFM was managing the portfolio.
Its low-price, high-volume strategy had caused its TLDs to become the destinations of choice for spammers and other abusive registrants.
But the court case was brought after Roache attempted to break up DVP, restructure ownership of the 16 individual registries, and “escape the regulation of Gibraltar”, Maroney said.
“Roache wanted to shut down DVP in a way we considered to be unlawful,” he said.
He said DVP shareholders felt Roache’s moves were “inappropriate and unlawful”, which is what caused him to “engineer”, via fellow investor Christina Mattin, DVP being placed into administration.
I have seen no independent evidence that Roache acted or attempted to act unlawfully. The court document I’ve seen appointing Lavarello as administrator contains no finding of wrongdoing by anyone.
The upshot of all this is that the group of TLDs formerly known as Famous Four Media is now GRS Domains — Global Registry Services Ltd — and that Lavarello is currently in charge.
I imagine the company will want to find permanent management at some point, but Maroney did not want to talk about that.
In the meantime, GRS has already made moves to become more transparent and to engage more with the rest of the industry.
Maroney said, and I have independently confirmed, that he was at the ICANN meeting in Panama recently, meeting senior industry figures. Famous Four executives have not been known to attend ICANN meetings or industry events in the past.
GRS has told registrars it intends to have a formal presence at ICANN 63 in Barcelona also.
The company will shortly terminate all of its promotional pricing and introduce a flat $9.98 registry fee, which is very likely to affect its volumes and reduce spamming activity over the next year or so.
UPDATE July 30 2020: This article was edited to remove an erroneous link to the web site of Engineers Gate LP, which is not the same company as Engineer’s Gate Investments LLC.
UPDATE August 12 2020: This article was edited to correct GRS’s ownership status. It’s owned by PwC, not DVP. Roache’s job title at FFM was also corrected.
In addition, Roache recently wrote to DI, almost two years after the article was originally published, and made the following statements:

Famous Four Media (FFM) was placed in voluntary administration by myself and Mr Rasmussen as respective 80% and 20% shareholders, due to invoices that went unpad by PWC Gibraltar as administrator to DVP.
…
There was NO “court battle to replace FFM with GRS”. FFM withdrew services after promises to pay FFM its outstanding invoices by PWC turned out to be untruthful.
…
To say or repeat the allegation that it was “unlawful” to close the fund down is untrue… DVP was set up as a closed end fund with a maximum maturity of April 2018 on 12 April 2012 — i.e. a 5-year fund with a one-year extensions.
Against the recommendation of myself as Investment Director and largest creditor and investor, the support of the Board, the regulated Fund Administrator Juno, the Fund’s own regulated legal counsel Isolas and the approval of the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission — a number of investors pushed to place the Fund into administration. The actions of those few investors led by Ms Mattin, Mr Maroney and PWC have been hugely prejudcial to other investors in DVP and the seed investors, including myself. In April 2018 the valuation of the Fund’s assets was in excess of £30 million and of the total registry assets more than £100 million — today the value is close to zero if not insolvent under the disastrous management of PWC, Maroney and Mattin.
Mr Maroney’s statement that he “engineering the ousting of Mr Rasmussen and I” is also untrue — I made it clear to all investors in DVP in an emaill dated October 2017 that if the Fund was not redeemed in Specie with investors honouring their debts then the alternative choice would be a structured administration which ran the risk of losing their entire remaining assets in DVP.

Famous Four is DEAD! New registry promises spam crackdown

Famous Four Media’s portfolio of gTLD registries is now under the control of a new company, Global Registry Services Ltd, which has promised to abandon its failed penny-domain strategy and crack down on spam.
(August 9 update: This article contains some incorrect assumptions and speculation. Please read this follow-up piece for clarifications.)
The company, which goes by the name GRS Domains, told registrars yesterday that FFM’s 16 gTLDs are now “controlled by the same parties that control Domain Venture Partners PCC Limited, and are no longer under the management of FFM.”
DVP also owned FFM, so it’s not clear how big of a deal this restructuring is from a management point of view.
My sense is that there’s not really been a substantial change, but it’s certainly more than a simple rebranding exercise.
I’ve learned that DVP was placed into administration under the Insolvency Act back in April, with management of the TLDs handed to a PricewaterhouseCoopers administrator, more or less as I speculated in June.
The TLDs affected are: .loan, .win, .men, .bid, .stream, .review, .trade, .date, .party, .download, .science, .racing, .accountant, .faith, .webcam and .cricket.
GRS told registrars:

Moving forward there are several changes being made with regard to the overall strategy of the portfolio of gTLDs, the main one being a change to a “quality over quantity” ethos and focusing on working with our Registrar Partners to sharply reduce abuse and spam registrations.

As such, all of its current pricing promotions will end August 20 and a “much more transparent and sensible pricing strategy” will come into play.
That means a wholesale reg fee of $9.98 across the board, at least until February 2019.
GRS also plans to take a lot of its lower-priced reserved “premium” names out of the premium program altogether, and to reprice “a considerable portion” of the more expensive ones.
Finally, the company, not known to attend ICANN meetings in the past, said it plans to show up at the Barcelona meeting in October to formally relaunch itself.
Famous Four has become notorious over the last few years for its deep-discounted TLDs, which have become a haven for spammers who want to register large numbers of super-cheap, throwaway domains.
As such, its gTLDs’ volumes have been huge — many racking up hundreds of thousands of names — but their renewals poor and their reputation worse.
If GRS’ new strategy is effective, we’re almost certainly going to see the industry-wide overall number of active new gTLD domains tank over the next year or so, giving more ammunition to those who think the new gTLD program was a huge waste of effort.
It could also have an impact on ICANN’s budget — no matter how cheap FFM sold its names, it still had to pay its ICANN fees on a per-domain basis. Fewer domains equals less money in ICANN’s coffers. FFM’s registries paid over $1.6 million in ICANN fees in the organization’s fiscal 2017.
While GRS is now apparently “controlled by the same parties that control Domain Venture Partners PCC Limited”, it’s not abundantly clear to me whether that’s the same people who’ve been running FFM for the last eight years.
DVP has not immediately responded to a request for comment today.
The DVP web site has not resolved in months. The new grs.domains site doesn’t name anyone, and the NIC sites for the gTLDs in the portfolio only identify a PwC bankruptcy accountant as the primary contact.
All the companies in question are based in tax haven Gibraltar, which isn’t particularly forthcoming about identifying company directors, partners or owners.
DVP’s directors were originally Adrian Hogg, Charles Melvin, Iain Roache, Douglas Smith, Peter Young, Joseph Garcia and a company called Domain Management II (itself chaired by Roache), according to an investor presentation (pdf) DI obtained back in 2013.
I believe Melvin at least, after a legal dispute with the others, is no longer involved.
And it appears that DVP is or was in fact in administration.
I noted back in June that the 16 gTLDs were now all being administered by PwC accountant Edgar Lavarello, and wondered aloud whether this meant FFM was bankrupt.
Today I obtained (read: paid an extortionate sum for) a Gibraltar court order dated April 23 putting DVP into administration under the Insolvency Act and appointing PwC as the administrator.
The application had been made by an investor called Christina Mattin and fellow investor Braganza, a private vehicle owned by a wealthy Scandinavian family, which was (at least last year) a 10% owner.
Other named investors the court heard from were the mysterious Liechtenstein-based Rennes Foundation, something called Northern Assets Investments Limited and Dutch multimillionaire Francis Claessens.
Overall, it smells a bit to me like DVP’s principals, having seen their previous venture put out of business by disgruntled investors, have snapped up its assets and are going to try to make a second go of running the business.
As for FFM? Well, it looks rather like we won’t be hearing that name again.
UPDATE: This article was updated several hours after it was originally posted to clarify that DVP was/is “in administration”.