The owner of the beleaguered English-language portal Poland.com will file for bankruptcy as soon as its prospective white-knight investor decides to end talks, Tomasz Głowiak, Poland.com's president and co-owner told the WBJ.
In late March, Poland.com's owners signed an exclusive letter of intent (LOI) with a Polish IT company for investment talks in an attempt to financially resuscitate the indebted portal, which owes about zł. 15 million ($3.66 million) to its creditors. The LOI expires at the end of September.
"If the (prospective) investor pulls out, I am filing for bankruptcy on the very same day," Głowiak said. "If we lose the investor, we would not be able to operate anymore."
He added that Poland.com's chances of securing a deal with a prospective investor were low and that it would be impossible to find another investor because "there's no time to start from scratch again."
Głowiak also said that he still had not received overdue legal documents from Poland.com's former majority owner, telecom and energy holding company Elektrim, finalizing the sale of Elektrim's 75% stake in the portal to Głowiak and two colleagues last November. Without the legal document, Głowiak said he would not be able to complete any deal with the prospective investor.
Marcin Zabielski, an independent consultant who had been hired by Elektrim last year to close out its loss-making Internet-related companies, said the company's lawyers had approved the document last January, but that the firm's management never stated a formal reason why it had not delivered it.
Since last December, Elektrim has been caught up in a battle with its angry creditors who demand repayment on defaulted bonds. Ewa Bojar, Elektrim's spokeswoman, would not comment.
Poland.com was the flagship Internet project of MCI Management, a Polish venture capital firm, which created the portal in the second quarter of 2000 to provide English-language speakers with information about news and events in Poland.
Despite last year's spate of Internet-related failures, Poland.com managed to stay alive when Elektrim purchased a stake in the portal from MCI in September 2000.
Głowiak, who recently made some cosmetic changes to the portal, was considering introdu-cing a new strategy to sell online IT services.
