Most readers will be aware of this story, here’s the latest update on the allegations.
The Curaleaf Papers·Part I
The secret foreign financing behind the $4 billion cannabis giant.
On October 29, 2018, cannabis giant Curaleaf went public on the Canadian Securities Exchange. In prior weeks, it had raised approximately $400 million from investors, valuing the company at $4 billion. It was the biggest cannabis company in the world, and its chairman, Boris Jordan, was a billionaire.
What the public did not know is that days earlier, on October 26, 2018, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan sent a federal grand jury subpoena in a money laundering and corruption probe that appeared to be focused squarely on Curaleaf.
The FBI quietly investigated the money behind Curaleaf for money laundering and public corruption for at least a year, according to bureau records obtained by The Newsground under the Freedom of Information Act.
Two federal grand juries examined the money, one in Manhattan and one in Philadelphia. Both ended without charges.
Much of Curaleaf’s funding came from Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire and Vladimir Putin associate who was later sanctioned by Britain, the European Union and Canada. This reporter revealed his undisclosed funding of the company via loans at Forensic News in December 2022, four years after the FBI probe.
What the FBI asked
The bureau released 64 pages and withheld 147 more, most of them protected under grand jury secrecy rules. The records were provided to The Newsground by researcher Joe Lloyd, who filed the FOIA request for FBI materials mentioning Curaleaf.
The New York investigation was focused on potential violations of 18 U.S. Code § 1956, the federal statute for money laundering. A second grand jury was empaneled in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Its FBI file number carries the prefix 194A, the bureau’s classification for public corruption investigations.
Read the full report
FBI Investigated Curaleaf for Corruption and Money Laundering
Read the DOJ files (from a FOIA) here – https://archive.org/details/
Read Scott’s groundbreaking new article, in full, here – https://thenewsground.com/fbi-
Read my (Grant Smith-Ellis’s) coverage of a wild series of events involving regulators in Massachusetts and a 2023 investigation into Curaleaf’s Russian ties (that includes inadvertent leaks and much more) here – https://www.patreon.com/
