GTV, a Chinese language video streaming site launched in 2020 by Steve Bannon and fugitive Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui, shut down on Thursday morning amid mounting legal troubles for Guo.
“Dear comrades in arms, GTV has been completely shut down at 12:00 in the morning yesterday,” Guo announced Thursday on Gettr, the social media app he has also funded. Guo, who has cultivated an image as a foe of the Chinese Communist Party, blamed the company’s closure on data tampering by “the Communist Party.” (Mother Jones translated his comments, which were originally in Chinese.)
But the shuttering of the site, which featured hours-long daily videos of Guo and translated versions of Bannon’s War Room podcast, came weeks after Guo filed for bankruptcy in the wake of a court ruling ordering him to pay about $250 million to a creditor suing him for breach of contract. And that ruling was just his latest legal setback. In September, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged GTV with conducting an illegal stock offering and ordered it and a parent company to pay more than $450 million to compensate investors. Dozens of investors in GTV, almost all Chinese speakers, have sued the company and Guo. The investors allege they never received the GTV stock they paid for, despite Guo’s pledges that they could invest with “no business risk.” The SEC is still investigating the GTV stock offering and related fraud allegations, sources told Mother Jones.