I think we need some clarifications here because if you agree that Shogun is a notorious liar, you also must double check the stories he told, which you now take as "facts"
Metin2 PH was not illegal in any way. The license Webzen provied was SEA South East Asia. Meaning it doesn't limit to open servers only in Singapore but in the entire South Eastern region of Asia.
The reason why people like you think it was illegal is only because of Shogun's lies. He wanted Christopher to sub license the server to him (something that is also absolutely legal to do), in exchange he would have provieded updates for both servers. He started to hire and even raise the salary of his "dev team" (in quotations because one was more incompetent than the other). When he realised PH was meant to be ip blocked and advertisement blocked as well, he called himself off, Chris paid the promised salary (even though he shouldn't have) and a few weeks later Shogun had an argumentation with Chris, he stole SG files and opened WOM.
Now, of course he didn't open Wom right away, he sent his CV to Guabina and then Gameforge. Yep few months ago he mocked one of his former employee to have sent an application to become a Gameforge Employee but he did the exact same.
The reason of the argumentation was one of his former designers (1 banner per month basically): a 17 year old girl which he was secretly in love with. He expected Chris to pay her an absurd amount of money per month just to have a chance with her.
Of course the good old Shogun claimed he left due to the corruption, Metin2 PH being illegal and what else not, but I am pretty sure that if anybody connects the dots, they would see the absurd controversy of such statement: You leave because you don't want to be part of some illegal business and 2 months later you open an illegal private server?
Evidences were posted on elitepvpers at that time, however, they were deleted.
He later created a goodbye thread on a different Forum which he was one of the Admins of, claiming to leave the Metin2 Scene, always twisting facts as if he was sort of a victim bullied by us, when in reality, all he did for years was crap talking and fabricating lies.
This covers 2012.
On 2013 .US closed and some refugee asked to have a special treatment which was garanteed by Chris. This is nowhere a breach of contact, we had no database merge, the accounts were hand made and we can create anything we want, gift and hold events as we want as long as we respect a certain renevew per month, which with an increased CCU can only grow.
On 2013 Webzen took over Ymir and we signed a new contract with a new license for 3 years with an optional (for us) renewal for other 3. No license cost, but royalty raised from 25% to 35%. In this contract the ip block was not mentioned. So whoever claims we breach the contract because we created a multi language client or advertised on Eu, is simply wrong.
Between 2013 and 2014 Webzen pretty much allowed us to do custom updates as the version of SG was identical to .US but completly different to the one of Gameforge. Whoever played with us in 2013-14 knows very well that the server was afflicted by bugs
and lack of updates as we couldn't develope the server properly and Webzen was simply too slow to deliver fix and contents. From 2014 and 2015 SG had a tremendous boost on the player count thanks to our hard work and good patches.
This however created a problem, when we implemented our offline shop Webzen was under pressure by Gameforge, who recently stated on their froum that offline shop was not possible, only pserver do it cause they don't regard stability and security.
When their players pointed out we had it, they complained to Webzen. So basically we went back to square one, they took back their word to allow us to do custom updates, but they continued to not deliver us any contents which lead to the situation we are in.