Eaze, Founders Fund and the Wirecard Fallout

There are, uh, ongoing national security issues here

A ton of these venture firms in Silicon Valley are messed up, but Founders Fund is one of the worst. We’ve been over some of the problems there, but now it’s time to deal with Delian Asparouhov, who crawled out of a Bulgarian latrine all the way to the height of tech stardom.

The concept of his company is, maybe we can build factories in space. I dunno, Delian. Might be nice to build some here first.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the big mystery of Straussianism, the hidden gem, the esoteric teaching, the tabernacle, the family jewels, as it were, of Chicago philosophy.

It’s that some of them are into pederastic relationships. This jibes fairly well with the Israel lobby, which as we can see in the Senator Bob Menendez case, would tolerate a little kidfucking as long as you’re on the team. Nobody believed it back in 2013, because I guess our journalism élite has a difficult time fathoming that a Dominican child hooker might be susceptible to bribery or threats. That’s being generous.

Now, I consider myself a moderate when it comes to cannabis, but the structure of the legal market is pretty important, given all the criminals that play in it, and the smart cannabis market analysts know that. And as we’re about to see, one of these cannabis companies is connected very closely to the Wirecard scandal. That company is Eaze, which Delian has tweeted that he put $6k into when he had $8k in the bank. He deleted one of the tweets in that thread, after which someone asks about an SEC audit.

The former CEO of Eaze pled guilty to bank fraud, and there were a couple of more serious convicted criminals consulting with this company:

A Manhattan federal judge sentenced two former consultants for Eaze Technologies Inc to prison on Friday for their roles in a scheme to dupe U.S. banks into handling more than $100 million in payments to the online cannabis marketplace.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff sentenced Hamid (Ray) Akhavan, 43, to two and a half years in prison and Ruben Weigand to 15 months in prison. A jury convicted the two men on one count each of conspiracy to commit bank fraud in March.

Mr. Akhavan is an interesting person. Born in Iran, he’s at the center of a massive network of porno sites, and the Times has connected him to Wirecard.

An analysis of corporate filings and other documents by The Times has uncovered the extent of Mr Akhavan’s connections to Wirecard via hundreds of shell companies in London, Essex and Co Durham. The connections include pornographic websites owned by companies in Consett, Co Durham, set up by an entity in which Wirecard executives were shareholders.

The purpose of this network was to deceive banks that cannabis-related transactions, which banks are still skittish about, were not actually related to cannabis. Akhavan’s attorney, Bill Burck, is a Fox Corporation board member.

Wirecard is the massive fraud, once put up as the German PayPal, that blew up a few months ago amid allegations of a ton of Russian money running through it.

There’s this lawsuit against Eaze as well, which suggests it’s some sort of foreign-backed effort to consolidate the cannabis market:

The three cofounders of Green Dragon claim that they were deceived into selling their own successful company to San Francisco-based Eaze, which was then allegedly in “dire financial straits,” a fact that was allegedly kept from them. The Green Dragon cofounders also say Eaze is violating California’s cannabis law by illegally “renting” cannabis licenses from other dispensaries, instead of simply acting as a transportation middleman, a charge that the company denies.

The plaintiffs claim that Eaze “fraudulently acquired and raided Green Dragon for their own personal gain” and that they “lost millions of dollars” in expected revenue. As their concerns grew over time, they claim that they were shut out of the decision-making process within the company and were cut out of “secret meetings” between board members, then lost their own board seats and their executive-level jobs. The three Green Dragon cofounders were ultimately forced out of Eaze in February 2023.

Fundamentally, the trio says, they would have not entered into any business arrangement with Eaze had they known that the company was in such trouble. They and their attorney declined to comment.

This connects to the PayPal mafia in a couple of different ways, specifically David Sacks and Peter Thiel. Eaze’s four founders used to work for David Sacks’s company Yammer. Allegations were made by employees against Keith McCarty, the former CEO, and after his resignation in 2016, Sacks backed him again in 2017 to found Wavy. Court documents suggest McCarty is the one who plugged Eaze into this fraudulent network run by Akhavan. They were very close. When the LAPD visited where the two of them lived, Akhavan claimed the guns and crack belonged to him, and that he’d just hide them in his room when the hookers came over to party.

Akhavan also pops up in Dan McCrum’s book on Wirecard. He was apparently friends with Jan Marsalek, who is now a fugitive, believed to be in Russia. Oliver Hargreaves, who set up fake companies for Akhavan in the UK, was in touch with Marsalek himself, which closely connects Eaze to Wirecard, and it seems to have been a very large customer. His testimony indicates Akhavan was using Alibaba Chat for some of this, which raises all kinds of questions.

The other connection between Wirecard and the PayPal mafia is Christian Angermayer, this weirdo Austrian businessman into psychedelics, who arranged the big Softbank investment just prior to its collapse.

This photo is from three days ago. Sebastian Kurz, who went to work for Thiel after leaving office, pictured with Angermayer, on either side of the very Chinese head of the World Health Organization.

Look at all this bitching from Mike Solana and David Sacks after the SVB blow-up:

The prominent venture capitalist David Sacks, who had lobbied particularly hard for government intervention, bemoaned a “hateful media that will make me be whatever they need me to be in order to keep their attack machine going.” Michael Solana, a vice president at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, wrote on his blog that “tech is now universally hated,” warned of an incoming “political war,” and claimed “a lot of people ... genuinely seem to want a good old fashioned mass murder,” presumably of tech execs.

Music stopped, fellas.