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The dream house construction site in Montreal after the fire: Feras Antoon wanted to sell the property
Photo: Ryan Remiorz / imago images / ZUMA Press
More than 80 firefighters moved out on Monday night for an extinguishing operation in Montreal, Canada. A luxury property still under construction owned by Feras Antoon, head of the porn company MindGeek, was on fire. The Canadian company operates popular sex video portals such as Pornhub, RedTube, Mydirtyhobby and Brazzers worldwide. "Vice" reports that the fire brigade was preceded by a phone call to the police: two people are said to have been observed entering the property without permission.
Antoon's property has recently gone on sale online - for 19.8 million Canadian dollars, the equivalent of a good 13.2 million euros. "The exterior is as good as finished," says the ad, "as are the inner partitions." Those who buy the house on the more than 6500 square meter property can keep the intended design or redesign it according to their own taste.
The luxury building should include an »aquarium lounge«, a home spa, a billiard room, three garages for three cars each and a sports area for basketball, volleyball and badminton, as well as eleven bathrooms.
The Canadian news website CBC writes that Antoon bought the property on which the property is to be built for a good two million Canadian dollars.
He also made the headlines because he had more than 200 trees felled to build the house.
The fire is likely to have set the construction work back.
A Twitter video from a CBC reporter shows what the property looked like after the fire.
Nobody was injured by the fire.
Feras Antoon confirmed to "Vice" that the fire broke out on his property.
"I am grateful that my family, myself and our neighbors are safe," said Antoon.
With a view to the ongoing police investigations, he will not comment further.
It is under investigation for arson
The Montreal police have so far assumed arson.
One of their spokespersons told "Vice" that the department responsible for such cases had taken over the investigation.
According to the spokesman, the police officers arriving on site could see that there was a fire inside the building first.
Why Antoon wanted to sell his luxury building before completion is unknown. You don't really know much about the digital entrepreneur. Like other top managers in the porn industry, Antoon is reluctant to appear in public. In February, however, the Syrian-born entrepreneur was heard by the Ethics Committee of the Canadian Parliament.
MindGeek subsidiary Pornhub had previously come under fire from a New York Times article.
Author Nicholas Kristof shed light on the dark side of the platform in the world-wide acclaimed article.
He reported on sex videos with minors, clips showing non-consensual sex, and secretly filmed spy footage.
Accusations and problems that had previously been denounced by other media, activist groups and those affected repeatedly caught up with Pornhub.
Who are the men behind MindGeek?
Most likely because the report scared Visa and Mastercard, Pornhub announced new measures in response to public outrage to make the platform more secure, including verification of uploaders by a third party.
Antoon's appearance before the ethics committee, on the other hand, raised new questions, such as whether a company boss doesn't need to know how many subsidiaries his company has.
When asked about this, Antoon replied that he did not know that offhand, because we were restructuring every now and then.
Feras Antoon deliberately did not want to answer a question about his income.
When asked who MindGeek belongs to, CEO Antoon said that the company was sold to a group of people in 2013 by German entrepreneur Fabian Thylmann.
Antoon referred to himself and COO David Tassilo.
But he also stated that over 50 percent of the company belongs to a passive investor from Europe named Bernard Bergemar, who is not involved in day-to-day business.
Bergemar's role only became public in December 2020 through an article in the Financial Times.
The newspaper wrote about a businessman whose name was "almost completely invisible" on the Internet.
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