The "weeLoveEurope" campaign was recognised as one of the best loyalty campaigns worldwide in 2019. Hundreds of thousands of retailers and millions upon millions of end consumers should make "wee" a blue chip. (Image credit: wee presentation, Facebook)
Ten questions on the alleged white-collar crime surrounding "wee", MPM and COOINX: Can those responsible escape the widespread suspicion of fraud, gang crime, the acceptance of benefits and insolvency fraud, etc.?
Content status 12.2023
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"We want consumers in China to use the weeApp to make their everyday purchases cashless in the future... If only half of the 1.4 billion Chinese are interested in sport, our business case has a potential customer base of over 500 million fans."
(Oliver Kaiser, former Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Sports & Entertainment division of "wee", on the occasion of the ratification of a preliminary agreement with the Chinese economic region of Shenzhen in July 2019.)
Essentially, there are five people involved: Cengiz Ehliz, the long-standing "beneficial owner" and majority shareholder who, formally without any function, was actively involved in all important decisions in the "wee orbit", Mirko Scheffler and Peter Grünewald, both board members of the former "wee sales partner" MPM Group AG, Michael Scheibe, CEO of the former sales partner COOINX SE of "wee" and Dr Leo Schrutt, former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the "wee Group".
In addition to these protagonists, the former board members of companies in the "wee Group" and influential external advisors could also be relevant to the criminal prosecution. It is also possible that the wives and partners of the main suspects in our view will be included in the criminal charges, as they were managing directors of various companies into which money from the "wee orbit" was channelled.
The intermediaries and financial advisors from the sales organisation are also at risk of being charged under civil law, as has already happened in Switzerland, for example. This is because some investors believe that they were given incorrect or inadequate advice. We will not take action here. We believe that our participation as an intermediary in our offer is the best argument in favour of our own clients and brokered investments that we have acted to the best of our knowledge and belief.
In principle, all investigations are conducted by the competent public prosecutor's office. And the public prosecutors decide who is investigated, who is charged and who is not. Until then, the principle of innocence applies, as is customary in a constitutional state. Our research, its evaluation and the lawyers' analysis suggest the following suspicions: commercial fraud, international gang crime, delaying insolvency, corruption, insolvency fraud, misappropriation, embezzlement and personal enrichment of investor funds. We are convinced that we can substantiate these allegations with sufficient incriminating material and evidence. It is the task of our lawyers to present this convincingly in the form of a criminal complaint.
Brand communication and promotions helped "wee" achieve great brand awareness. (Image credit: "wee, Facebook, 16/09/2019)
The competent public prosecutor's office and, if charges are brought, the judges will decide whether this is a case of economic and gang crime. Just one example of many: the Czech money! There is no question that a total of around 7.1 million euros were frozen in two accounts at a Czech bank in Prague, which were raised through the sale of wee ICO tokens for weeNexx AG. Money from thousands of investors! These funds had been parked by weeNexx AG in "front accounts" under the name of a third party.
The Prague Police Directorate investigated the suspicion of money laundering and, after extensive investigations, the assets of weeNexx AG were initially confiscated. Every investor rightly asks the question? Why does a supposedly reputable Swiss company have to rent two Czech "front accounts" at a dubious bank from an equally dubious German company? Answer: Because neither German banks, let alone Swiss banks, trusted weeNexx AG at the time. All this happened despite - or because of - the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Dr Schrutt, who, according to his own statements, had been a reputable top banker in Switzerland for decades, including as Chief Analyst at Credit Suisse. Is that already fraud? Certainly not - at the very least omission of information, at best cleverness in a crisis situation... However, if the investors had known this, the sales success of the Family & Friends Roadshow by "wee" would certainly have been less successful.
Regardless of this, these funds were released by the Brno public prosecutor's office in mid-2021 and transferred to the trust account of the Czech "wee lawyer". From this point onwards, the official trail of the millions of euros has been lost!
But where did these funds go? Who planned the "escape route" for the money? Who authorised the transfers from the Czech Republic? It was 100% investor money that belonged to weeNexx AG! If these funds had been properly transferred to weeNexx AG, there would most likely have been no need for bankruptcy... In any case, the responsible Chairman of the Board of Directors, Dr Schrutt, did not provide any information about the whereabouts of these funds when filing for bankruptcy at the Swiss bankruptcy office in Thurgau! Although he was the only remaining director of the Swiss companies in the "wee cosmos" and thus the only one authorised to make decisions regarding the transfer of these funds. The formal documents of the bankruptcy officials state: These 7.1 million euros never existed because they were not stated in weeNexx AG's bankruptcy disclosures. So what actually happened to the 7.1 million euros? We don't want to go into detail here - but the path of the money, including the people responsible for it, can of course be traced and proven. Keyword: reviewing all, really all documents from the Thurgau bankruptcy office, analysing the information provided by third parties, forensic research!
The term enrichment is defined in civil law: It refers to an increase in assets that has been obtained without legal basis at the expense of another. The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of wee Nexx AG raised around 45 million euros. This money was to be used to significantly develop and expand the "wee marketplace". Officials at the time celebrated the "jingle" in the till, although the original sales target was 100 million euros. Contrary to internal agreements, no institutional investors could be motivated to buy, which led to a 55% drop in sales expectations. Only "Family & Friends programmes" were responsible for the sales achieved! And what happened to this investor money? One thing is clear: the European marketplace was not even remotely developed!
An estimated amount in the tens of millions of euros was squandered on unnecessary sponsorships, bad investments in IT, horrendous consultancy costs, a bloated workforce and incentives. This can perhaps be labelled as collateral damage due to mismanagement and has nothing to do with enrichment... But it gets interesting when you study the different contracts between different companies and the same people involved. If these contracts are to be believed, the expected proceeds from the token sale were already divided among the responsible protagonists before the ICO even took place. It is said to have been agreed in writing that a good 70% of the proceeds from the crypto IPO would be distributed for commissions, consultancy fees and unjustified salaries for top management. Is that all true? Let's wait and see...
Speaking of which, the weeNexx AG whitepaper on the crypto-listig completely fails to mention sales commissions. Can we already speak of fraud and omission here? At the very least, the prospectus information is very incorrect!
The vision of a global wee payment system fizzled out abruptly in 2021 (Image credit: Facebook, YouTube, weeNexx AG).
According to the distributors' own statements, the sale of so-called "product packages", shares (IPO) and the proceeds from crypto-listings generated an estimated 150 million euros over a period of eight years. 99.99% of this revenue was contributed by investors, with a fraction coming from transaction fees. As a result of the bankruptcies in Switzerland and Germany, all the money has been lost.
The weeArena in Bad Tölz opened its doors on Sunday 17 September 2017. Several million euros were invested in the digitalisation of the ice stadium and in the sponsorship with the Tölzer Löwen. (Photo credit: "wee" Facebook, 14/09/2017)
Back in December 2016, visionary Cengiz Ehliz informed the public that 10,000 bricks-and-mortar retailers and online shops were connected to the "wee orbit". Nine months later, the company announced In the next six months, an additional 15,000 retailers and ten million new end consumers in 100 European metropolises are to be won over to using the product. One year later, the figures are completely different: In the white paper on the crypto listing, those responsible provide information about "only" 30,000 "docked" retailers and 1,300 integrated online shops in the meantime, as well as over 500,000 users across Europe.
In an article from October 2022, Handelsblatt, the most renowned German daily newspaper for business and finance, reveals the secret of the fake news about "wee" that has been communicated for years: only a good 600 stationary retailers are said to have earned money with the "wee system". Michael Scheibe, the charismatic COOINX boss, was still trumpeting an unbelievable core message in 2019 to motivate investors. His slogan as a target definition: "One billion customers and 50 million retailers worldwide!"
"Bad luck!" said the now dubious visionary Cengiz Ehliz in an interview with Handelsblatt. His lengthy criminal proceedings in Antwerp, which he survived without criminal charges, are said to have deterred investors. And the coronavirus crisis took care of the rest... The pandemic has done diametric damage to the retail sector. Couldn't this crisis have been used as a "business turbo" with carefully managed investor funds? When else, if not during this time, did every retailer, restaurateur and hotelier in Europe have enough time to think about an innovative, functioning payment system with a cashback guarantee?
We think no to this argument! We are certain: "Corona" and "Antwerp" were the fig leaf for a well-planned exit. Motto: "Close the lid silently - no one will ask!"
MPM Group AG under the leadership of Mirko Scheffler has also filed for bankruptcy in the meantime. The reasons for this were not made public! Some of the former MPM sales structures under Scheffler's leadership are now said to be working for Bradley Mundt, the founder of the Swiss Plan-B Net Zero Group, which is an innovator in the field of green energy throughout Europe. The German company is based as a GmbH in Mühlheim am Main, registered in the commercial register at the Berlin-Charlottenburg district court. Yes, Bradley is the son of Robert Mundt, who was Cengiz Ehliz's closest advisor at "wee" for many years and became known through the Flexstrom insolvency. According to the business/financial medium Handelsblatt, this insolvency left behind debts totalling EUR 511 million. It is rumoured that "service packages" are once again being sold to implement Plan-B's ambitious corporate goals, which represent promises for the future.
Peter Grünewald, former CEO of MPM, and his "buddy" Ehliz are competing in the same business segment as Plan-B. BestPrime GmbH in Regensburg is designed to help customers save energy costs. Grünewald is the managing director with sole power of representation and Ehliz is registered as the owner with CompanyHouse. Here, too, the aim is to convince investors of a bright future.
Michael Scheibe: This "jack-of-all-trades", who predicted one billion customers for "wee" in 2019, was initially involved in the sale of a Chinese cryptocurrency. He is currently pitching Dubai property to potential investors! His Luxembourg-based COOINX S.A. no longer appears to be active.
And what is Dr Leo Schrutt doing? He seems to have completely disappeared...
Yes, we and our law firm are aware of the file numbers from Germany. The same applies to Switzerland. From the point of view of our lawyers and according to our own assessment, the facts listed here are not sufficient to be really successful. In addition, as far as we know, a kind of class action lawsuit is currently being prepared by a law firm, which we have actively supported until the end of August 2023. Whether a criminal complaint has actually been filed is not known to us at the time of writing this website. We wish this law firm every success!
Our research is complete. We have been provided with highly confidential and ultimately conclusive documents from a wide variety of areas and people. Of course, we have also involved specialists in this research, keyword "forensic research"... We are currently planning the strategy of how to proceed with the lawyers. We do not want to answer here whether we will file one or more criminal charges. We are also leaving it open here whether the criminal complaint will be comprehensive or only cover individual topics. It is already clear which persons will be charged in this criminal complaint, but this is not the subject of this information. We are not just reporting, we see ourselves as partners of the investigating authorities and provide the evidence for the allegations. The fact is that our criminal complaint(s) and those of our lawyers will be successful. From our point of view, this means: just punishment! Our lawyers will co-operate with the public prosecutor's office to recover money from the private individuals via the possible recovery assistance. The money will be divided among the participants in the initiative or the lawsuit according to a defined key and to the best of our knowledge and belief. We are also leaving it open at this point whether we will take additional civil action. Every single person who joins our "wee-money-back initiative" and is included in the criminal complaint, regardless of whether they are private individuals, entrepreneurs or companies, is one more argument for the investigating authorities to maximise their involvement in this case.