Damien Mulley

To save you from reading the whole post: They make mobile apps. Apps to download porn, gambling apps and viral video viewing apps.

Today the Indo had a piece on porn company Manwin and their Irish setup. The Irish Times also did this story a few months back.

The bit that interested me was them not saying what they do here:

Manwin refused to comment in detail on what it does here or to discuss whether it had located here in part for tax purposes.

“Manwin is a private company and accordingly, matters pertaining to its operations are treated in the same manner,” the spokesperson said.

If you did some LinkedIn searches however, you’d find a number of people who work for Manwin.

This is their CEO for Ireland.

Now there’s a games company in Dublin called Super Hippo Studios that never mentions they’re owned by Manwin on their site. But some of the Super Hippo Studios staffers confirm the Manwin link on their LinkedIn profiles:

and:

A search of the CRO and we find out…
Super Hippo Studios Registered Office:
1St Floor
Riverview House
21/23 City Quay
Dublin 2
Ireland

Which is the same registered address as Manwin Ireland.

And Super Hippo acknowledge on GameDevelopers.ie who their owner is but point out that they don’t do anything around porn:

Anyway, Super Hippo (who we now know is owned by Manwin) tweeted about some of their games.

One is a Trivia game. On iTunes the publisher is registered as another company, yet again – Mirmay Limited.

and a lookup of them on Duedil tell us…

Registered Office:
1st Floor
Riverview House
21/23 City Quay
Dublin 2
Ireland

Same address for the Manwin companies and Super Hippo, this is just a firm that does all of these registrations but, still, all using the same company to reg.

And some of their other “apps” include this one that hints at it being used to download video content from “tubes” sites and to hide away the content then: “The app allows you to easily download media from free tubes and other media sites to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. ”

Tubes, hmm. And going back to Manwin wikipedia page: “Manwin is the owner of many major pornographic web 2.0 websites including YouPorn, Pornhub, Tube8, XTube, ExtremeTube”

Apple is very anti-porn so one can’t say directly on an ITunes listing that an app is for porn as it might be banned. This app was only recently updated: May 20, 2013.

And so a further twist, another of the games made by Mirmay/Super Hippo/Manwin is called Video Bash.

The app and website mentions Clayden Holding Ltd, owned by the owner of Manwin, though they say registered in Cyprus but a record I found said that company was dissolved in Cyprus. Here is the Canadian listing.

And finally, a gambling game made by them, Golden Slots Casino.

Fairly convoluted structure.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 26th, 2013 at 5:30 pm and is filed under irishblogs, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.