A recent Wall Street Journal report revealed that German billionaire Christian Angermayer has been connecting Tether to various investment opportunities, including his portfolio companies Northern Data and Blackrock Neurotech.

Angermayer takes a fee from firms to introduce them to various investors. Additionally, he makes investments through a variety of entities underneath Apeiron Investment Group, his family office.

These entities include Elevat3, which partners with Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, Presight Capital, Apeiron Partners, re.Mind, Cryptology (which he co-founded with Mike Novogratz), and Limestone Capital. 

Overlaps with Tether

Angermayer owned a stake in Northern Data through Apeiron Investment Group. Northern Data has been accused by former executives of stock manipulation schemes. 

He was reportedly paid a 5% fee for transactions that followed from introducing Tether to Northern Data. 

Tether and Angermayer are also linked through Angermayer’s investment in Block.One, which was founded by the stablecoin’s co-founder Brock Pierce. 

Block.One was also an investor in Northern Data.

Angermayer also invested in Bullish, the exchange spun out from Block One, via the Presight Capital investment fund. Additionally, Angermayer served as a ‘senior advisor’ to the firm, which has subsequently purchased CoinDesk.

He also invested in Blackrock Neurotech, a firm developing brain-computer interfaces via the re.Mind entity. Tether purchased a majority stake in this firm earlier this year. 

Wirecard

Angermayer previously connected beleaguered Wirecard with SoftBank, eventually leading to SoftBank’s $1.1 billion investment into Wirecard. 

Shortly after this investment, Wirecard collapsed due to accounting fraud.

Angermayer additionally helped coordinate HNA Group’s investment in Deutsche Bank, which saw his friend Alexander Schütz appointed to the supervisory board for Deutsche Bank.

Schütz was subsequently investigated for insider trading allegations in Wirecard, though the criminal probe was dismissed by prosecutors.

Tether itself has some distant ties to Wirecard. Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan, a consulting firm, once provided a letter that claimed Tether had the funds it was supposed to. Louis Freeh, a former FBI director, defended Allied Wallet, a payments firm that was a longtime client of Wirecard and provided services to questionable businesses, including Ponzi schemers, debt collectors, and online poker firms. 

Additionally, FTX/Alameda Research, one of Tether’s top two largest clients, relied on Cuscal Bank in Australia, a former Wirecard partner. 

Read more: Casino operators with ties to Tether, Wirecard busted for money laundering

Other investments

Angermayer, a former biotech entrepreneur, has a varied investment portfolio.

As well as a number of biotech and pharmaceutical investments, he has also invested in psychedelic therapies, something he chooses to partake in regularly. This is only part of his personal supplementation and pharmaceutical regimen, which also included Modafinil and Ozempic. 

He also used to be a prominent investor in banks, purchasing the Banque Rwandaise de Développement, followed by a bunch of other banks across the region.

His investment portfolio also includes things like Boring Company, the tunnel company started by Elon Musk, which is part of the portfolio for Presight Capital.

He has also started paying “literal cowboys” to try to dig up dinosaur fossils in Montana, both because he loves dinosaurs and because he thinks it can be profitable. 

Additionally, as previously mentioned, Elevat3 invests alongside Thiel’s Founder Fund regularly, including investing in the Enhanced Games, the international sports event that allows competitors to use any performance-enhancing drug they can get access to. 

Angermayer’s role as a connector and networker sometimes stretches beyond simple business transactions; supposedly he is friends with Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor. 

Additionally, he reportedly introduced Thiel to Daniil Bisslinger, who works in Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bisslinger reportedly offered Thiel a meeting with Vladimir Putin, which Thiel reported to the FBI.

Angermayer told Forbes that this was an absurd controversy, stating, “I had a birthday party. I had two friends. They met each other there. Whatever friends of mine do, it’s not my thing.” 

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The post Christian Angermayer helped Wirecard, now he helps Tether appeared first on Protos.

Ji Xiaobo, the executive who oversaw Imperial Pacific, has been ruled guilty of operating a “criminal syndicate” by Chinese courts, according to reporting from Inside Asian Gaming. 

The syndicate allegedly operated by setting up casinos outside of China, extending debt to gamblers, and then using violence to collect repayment on those debts.

Fifteen individuals, including Ji’s aunt Cui Limei, were sentenced. Cui received eight and a half years behind bars and a $28,000 fine. Ji’s case will reportedly be tried separately.

Ji’s mother, Cui Li Jie, is an executive director and the largest shareholder in Imperial Pacific. The pair previously operated as parts of Heng Sheng Group, a Macau-based junket operator. 

The ruling by Chinese courts against Imperial Pacific are noteworthy for its ties to US agencies, Tether, and even Wirecard.

What was Imperial Pacific?

Imperial Pacific was an unusually successful Saipan-based casino. While the permanent casino was under construction and it could only rely on a smaller temporary location in a shopping mall, it was managing more than $2 billion per month in bets, according to reporting from Businessweek. This number dwarfed other operations, apparently nearly six times more than the fanciest tables in Macau. 

These efforts were aided in part by its “President of Global Capital Markets,” Shen Yan, a former Managing Director at Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, according to his LinkedIn. In 2016, after it was reported that the United States was investigating Imperial Pacific regarding potential money laundering-related issues, Yan was quoted as saying, “This is not possible. Of course we are not doing it.” He also made sure to emphasize that they had a robust anti-money laundering (AML) system and were fully compliant. 

In 2019, Imperial Pacific executives were indicted in a 71-count indictment, which alleged a variety of crimes, including criminal labor violations and money laundering. 

Imperial Pacific followed this by distancing itself in its own statement, where it claimed that “one of the persons indicted by the United States Department of Justice was a former employee of the group who was non-managerial staff and left in 2017.” 

Read more: China bans 80 top crypto influencers on Weibo

More recently, a forfeiture complaint targeting accounts connected to Imperial Pacific has alleged wire fraud and money laundering as part of an investigation into the relationship between Imperial Pacific and Governor Ralph Torres. 

Eugene Sullivan, a Ronald Reagan nominee to the United States appellate courts, was a director for Imperial Pacific, and after resigning that role, he was on the Advisory Board for the firm. Louis Freeh, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, was also on the advisory board for Imperial Pacific. Imperial Pacific’s Board also included James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

The Tether connection

Sullivan also briefly served on the Board of Advisors to Noble Bank, an International Finance Entity based in Puerto Rico. Noble Bank was founded by Brock Pierce, a founder of Tether, and John Betts. Betts and Pierce had previously worked together at Sunlot Holdings in their bid to revitalize Mt. Gox. Sunlot Holdings was advised by Louis Freeh, a former Federal Bureau of Investigations director.

Sullivan and Freeh are both partners in Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan. Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan was the firm that provided Tether with “a review of bank account documentation, Tether’s relevant policies and procedures, and a randomized inspection of the numbers of Tethers in circulation and the corresponding currency reserves.” 

Tether’s settlement with the New York Attorney General details how, in the months following this ‘verification’, Tether began lending hundreds of millions of dollars to Bitfinex in a series of undisclosed transactions. 

Similarities to other junkets

The report from Inside Asian Gaming says that Ji is believed to have gone into hiding following the arrests of other junket operators, including SunCity’s Alvin Chau and Tak Chun’s Levo Chan.

Chau ran the SunCity Junket, another Macau-based operation, along with Steven Xin, with Xin serving as the Australian side of the operation and Chau operating in Macau. This junket was apparently operated in coordination with ‘Broken Tooth’ Wan Kuok-koi, the boss of the Macau branch of the 14k Triad during the Triad wars. Kuok-koi has other ties to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, running the Dragon Coin cryptocurrency scheme. The US Treasury has sanctioned Kuok-koi and several related organizations. 

Read more: Casino heist used bitcoin ATM in elaborate $1M scheme

The Xin Money Laundering Organization provided shadow banking infrastructure to a variety of cryptocurrency businesses as part of this broader money laundering and capital flight operation.

Levo Chan was sentenced earlier this year on charges including fraud, illegal gambling, and money laundering.

Wirecard?

It is worth mentioning that there are some strange connections to another famous fraud, Wirecard. Freeh defended Allied Wallet, a company that provided payment services to a variety of scammers, Ponzi schemers, and illegal debt collectors. Among the payments included in this were over $13 million in funds related to Pokerstars, an online gambling company. Allied Wallet was also a long-time client of Wirecard. 

Interestingly, FTX and Alameda Research’s bankruptcy listed Cuscal, an Australian bank, as one of the entities FTX firms were interacting with. This relationship seems as though it may have been intermediated through Omipay. Cuscal itself was announced as one of the Australian banks that issued Wirecard-branded prepaid cards.

Read more: Forbes questions if Ripple is round-tripping XRP just like Wirecard

Alameda Research, notably, is one of Tether’s two largest clients. 

Overall, Australia, China, and the United States seem to be attempting to crack down on international money-laundering networks.

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Australian bank Cuscal was listed in FTX’s bankruptcy filings as one of the group’s banking partners. It was listed alongside Omipay, an Australian payments processor that focuses on offering payments to and from China.

Update 10:47AM UTC: Cuscal claimed in a letter sent to Protos that they have not provided any services to FTX, that no FTX customer funds with Cuscal, and that Cuscal has no relationship with Omipay, Bano, or Monix/Monixfin. When Protos asked for clarification because Bano, an authorized representative of Omipay, listed Cuscal in their Product Disclosure Statement, Cuscal responded: “This statement has not been included with Cuscal’s awareness. It is not correct or authorised and we will engage with them to have the PDS corrected. Omipay does not have a relationship with Cuscal. Cuscal does not offer retail banking services.”  

Protos also asked Cuscal: If Cuscal was providing services for a payments processor who FTX relied on, would Cuscal be aware that they were providing services to FTX/Alameda Research? To which they responded: Cuscal has limited visibility of the customers of our customers or customers of our customers’ customers and Cuscal has no ability to control beyond its direct clients. Cuscal directly contracts with its customers who are then responsible for the onboarding of their customers. 

When Protos asked Cuscal why they thought they might be listed in the FTX bankruptcy they responded: Cuscal client’s sometimes use an “off-system BSB” service to allocate virtual account numbers to their clients to ensure that deposits can be automatically reconciled. This uses a Cuscal BSB and settles in aggregate to a Cuscal client’s account. Deposits to FTX may have been made via use of a Cuscal BSB. The bankruptcy executors may have accordingly incorrectly considered this to be an account of FTX at Cuscal. 

Omipay also works with authorized representatives like Bano which provide other payment services, and it operates payment platform Monix/Monixfin. Protos previously reported that FTX used Monix to access banking services in Australia.

Omipay is a major payments processor for China and is one of the global remittances partners for Tencent’s WeChat Pay. The company trumpets the simplicity of its payments processing system when compared to its competitors.

Monix provided a way for FTX customers to deposit Australian Dollars into FTX before the collapse. Global Remit — one of the customers that provided a testimonial on Monix’s website — describes how Monix enables it to “gain rapid access to local bank systems of many countries.” The testimonial also brags that its “global real-name bank accounts have increased the retention rate of clients.”

Monix also advertises that it can “create bank accounts for clients abroad without the need for new infrastructure.”

Cuscal itself has had a number of brushes with scandal, including being one of the Australian banks that accepted payments for Wirecard merchant terminals and issued Wirecard branded prepaid cards. Wirecard itself also served the same role that Omipay now serves, as one of Tencent’s global remittances partners for WeChat Pay.

Read more: Alameda bought this obscure OTC desk to handle FTX banking

It’s currently unclear what amount of FTX customer funds remains with Cuscal, Omipay, or Monix.

Protos has reached out to Cuscal and Omipay/Monix for comment and to find out more about the services Monix provided to FTX. We’ll update if we hear back.

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