The German industry that made JuicyFields possible

On 26 May 2021 the Berlin state criminal police confirmed in writing that the company behind JuicyFields was already under investigation. Just over thirteen months later the company exited with roughly 645 million euros belonging to an estimated 186,000 investors. In the time between, the industry's own authorities went on standing on stage beside them, and one of them carried the company's own title of chief operating officer.

This investigation is built on JuicyFields' own marketing material, correspondence with authorities, and the fairs' own published pages. Svenskhampa is owned and published by Daniel Johansson personally. He is himself affected by JuicyFields and, together with other affected parties, pursues legal claims in the matter. See Ownership and transparency.

The fraud itself has been investigated. That part of the story has been told, most recently by the international consortium of journalists that published in November 2024.

On 11 July 2022 the platform closed and the money was gone. This text calls that the JuicyFields exit, because it was not a bankruptcy but a planned departure.

This investigation is about something else: how a fraud acquires its credibility.

The money was taken by Russians. But the company operated out of Berlin, sold itself into the German market, and built its standing inside a German industry. That is where the lawyers who lent it their titles were, and the consultant who vouched for the grows, and the fair that sold it their front page, and the trade paper that wrote up their credentials.

What the money bought

On 18 November 2021 The Cannabis Expo opened in Johannesburg. On the floor stood a booth few exhibitors could match: an illuminated cannabis leaf in the ceiling, a stage wall in green neon, staff in branded t-shirts, and above all of it the company name in metre-high letters.

Among the speakers at the same fair was Kai-Friedrich Niermann. He announced it himself on LinkedIn:

"Happy to speak at the Cannabis Expo in Johannesburg about the latest developments in Germany and to learn about the African market in detail. Reach out to me when you are there!"

The fair ran from 18 to 21 November 2021. Seven weeks earlier he had taken part in a JuicyFields webinar, and eight weeks earlier the warning had gone to his office address.

They were not merely exhibitors. On JuicyFields' own partner list, archived in September 2021 and May 2022, The Cannabis Expo appears under the heading "Our partners", in the same roster as the cultivation partners Sabores Purpura and Terra Cann Colombia. The fair had its own named feature, "The JuicyFields Freedom Festival", and the company's logo sat on the fair's front page as late as May 2022. From the retrospective page it has been quietly removed.

The Durban edition was held from 21 to 24 July 2022, ten days after the exit.

That is the picture this investigation is about. Not the money, but why so many in the industry chose to stand in it.

They had done it before

Sergey Berezin and Alexander Sivaks did not build JuicyFields from nothing. Before it they ran Recyclix, a pyramid based in Poland mapped by the V4 Investigative Journalism Centre. The shape of the marketing and the circle of collaborators already existed.

The first known marketing text about JuicyFields, "Make Solid Income By Joining The European Cannabis Crowdfunding Platform", was published on 1 April 2020. ICBC was to have opened at the Intercontinental in Berlin that same day.

The fair never took place that year, and the reason was the pandemic. On 12 December 2019 ICBC's own page carried the dates "1-3 April 2020". By 12 April 2020 it read "29-31 July 2020 - NEW DATES" instead. By June those dates had gone too, and the menu offered a "Virtual Global Symposium", that is, a switch to a digital format. Large public events were cancelled across Europe in that period, and none of it has anything to do with JuicyFields. The next time the industry gathered in Berlin in person was August 2021, and by then JuicyFields was the title sponsor.

What the police already knew

On 21 May 2021 a tip was submitted to the Landeskriminalamt Berlin about the website juicyfields.io. Five days later the reply came from Kriminalhauptkommissar Michael Kitschke at LKA 325, the unit that handles capital markets crime.

The answer was short. The company Juicy Grow GmbH was «bereits Gegenstand von Ermittlungen», already the subject of an investigation. The authority asked the informant for his date of birth in order to register him as a witness.

Just over thirteen months remained until the exit.

Who stood on the stage

On 26 and 27 August 2021 ICBC was held in Berlin, in the industry's own description Europe's largest business-to-business gathering for cannabis. The fair's speaker card set five portraits in a row.

Peter Homberg, partner at the law firm Dentons and head of its European cannabis group, who died in December 2025. Jan Peter Witte, managing director of Sanity Group's medical arm. Melanie Dolfen, pharmacy owner in Berlin. Daniel Gauci, listed as Chief Business Development Officer, Head of Content, JUICY FIELDS. And Kai-Friedrich Niermann, founder of the law firm KFN+.

The card was shared by Alan Glanse with the words "See you in Berlin". The same line-up was promoted in July 2021 by the National Cannabis Industry Association, the American trade body, in its own news programme.

This is how credibility is borrowed. Not by anyone asserting anything, but by the names standing in a row while the reader draws the conclusion that whoever was let onto the list has been vetted by someone.

Appearing on a speaker card is not an endorsement of the people beside you. The organiser sets the list. But the list is also the product. It is what a visitor buys, and it is what an investor sees.

The company was more than a guest on the list, though. It was the fair's title sponsor, and that is stated on the organiser's own website.

The title sponsor

The Internet Archive has preserved ICBC's own page for the Berlin fair, `internationalcbc.com/berlin/`, in some thirty captures. On 24 January 2021 JuicyFields is not mentioned at all. On 14 April that year this stands at the top of the page:

"TITLE SPONSOR. JuicyFields. Read more"

In the page's code sits a sponsor box with a single logo, linked directly to juicyfields.io. This is not a shared sponsor wall. It is the highest sponsor tier, and it was theirs.

Then follows this chronology, taken from the organiser's own pages:

Two things are worth pausing on. The title sponsorship first appears six weeks before the police notice, and it remains for at least eight months afterwards. And the name disappeared from the heading some time between January and June 2022, that is before the platform closed, while the logo stayed until after it.

The company also had a space booked. In the fair's own floor plan, archived on 26 June 2022, sits the entry `{"title":"Juicy Fields","id":"B276"}` for the fair on 19 and 20 July. JuicyFields had booth B276 allocated at a fair held eight days after the exit.

And not only Berlin

On 27 December 2021 ICBC published a press piece about returning to Barcelona on 10 March 2022, together with Spannabis. It says:

"At the conclusion of the superconference the International Cannabis Business Conference will host one of its world-famous after-parties. This year's after-party will be sponsored by Juicy Fields."

Seven months after the police notice, then, the organiser announced that JuicyFields was sponsoring the party. The fair also named the company as a sponsor in its own social channels.

The sentence in the press article no longer stands. On the live page the same sentence today reads: "This year's after-party will be sponsored by Cansativa." The article still carries its original date, 27 December 2021, and contains no note that it has been changed.

The Internet Archive dates the switch. In the capture of 6 July 2022, five days before the exit, "Juicy Fields" is still there. In the next preserved capture, 10 December 2022, it reads "Cansativa". The sentence is otherwise word for word the same, and the two captures lie five months apart.

This is not a correction. A correction would have been marked. It is a dated article from December 2021 in which a statement about who paid has been swapped out after the fact, with no notice to the reader. What that says about the fair's other published history is a question the reader may ask.

At ICBC Berlin 2022, the year after the title sponsorship, the keynote speaker was Germany's federal drug commissioner.

That is the authority an event builds up. And it is the authority that was available to borrow.

The letter to Rogers

On 16 August 2021 at 09:22, ten days before the Berlin fair, Finn Age Hänsel wrote to Alex Rogers. Hänsel is the founder and was then chief executive of Sanity Group, one of Germany's largest cannabis companies. The subject line reads "Re: ICBC Berlin B2B Sponsorship". Copies went to Jessie Corrigan and Tina Rogers.

"Sorry for the delay but two of our investors have a huge problem with JuicyFields, the main sponsor of the event and they asked to not put our name in any context with them. I don't know if you heard it from other participants too but the reputation of this company is unfortunately really horrible and the feedback goes from 'Ponzi Scheme' to 'straight criminal'. This is a major holdup and since I have to get approval for sponsoring activities that were not reflected in the earlier budget, this is currently a challenge for me."

It should be said exactly what the letter is, and what it is not. Hänsel does not accuse the company of a crime in his own name. He reports what his investors are saying, in a matter that for him concerns his own sponsorship and a budget he has to get approved. But he writes it to the owner of the fair, ten days before it opens, and he writes that the company that is its main sponsor is being described as everything from a Ponzi scheme to straight criminal.

That the email exists is confirmed by Hänsel himself, publicly. In a LinkedIn thread on 2 May 2024 he writes:

"I have a few points here: first of all, this was an internal email and I'm wondering where you got this from. Secondly what else shall we have done? We didn't have any relationship with Juicyfields and no touch points whatsoever ... during that time we were also not aware of the magnitude of what was happening."

And later in the same thread:

"I was not aware of their business model and the magnitude of it. During that time, it was more 'rumours' and rumours are not the right basis to do report anything."

Hänsel denies, then, every business connection with JuicyFields and describes his own knowledge at the time as rumours. He is not a subject of this investigation, and that denial stands here in full.

But the description of the document does not hold, and that can be settled from the document itself. The email was not internal. The recipient line is addressed to Alex Rogers, the subject line concerns the sponsorship of his fair, and copies went to two people outside Sanity Group. A letter to the owner of the fair is by definition not an internal matter, and the question of where someone obtained it is therefore a different question from the one Hänsel asks.

The email was published in full, with sender, date, recipient line and subject line, on juicyfieldscase.com on 2 May 2024. That site is run by the same person who publishes Svenskhampa, which the reader should know. On the same day Hänsel commented publicly on the publication, and did not dispute that the document was his.

It matters, because it determines what Rogers was told and when. According to an exchange of emails between Olofsson, Knodt and the journalist Marguerite Arnold in May 2023, Arnold was subsequently confronted by Rogers about the email, and she stood by her assessment that the company was a fraud. Rogers is said to have told her on that occasion that he had had two lawyers vet the company.

Arnold has further stated that she was not alone in objecting. According to her, Rogers knew the company was a fraud as early as the beginning of August 2021, before the fair, and went ahead regardless:

«Alex Rogers knew it was a fraud in early August 2021, before the ICBC conference. I and several others in industry warned him, amd he went ahead with it anyway.»

The account is hers, and concerns what she and others in the industry are said to have done. Svenskhampa has not been able to establish who the others are, and makes no claim about it.

Five months after August 2021 JuicyFields was still named as title sponsor on ICBC's front page, and the logo remained there for a further six months.

The statement that Rogers had two lawyers vet the company has been put to him, as is the statement that he was warned by several people in the industry as early as the beginning of August 2021. He has not replied.

The letter to Niermann

On 24 September 2021, at 07:44 UTC, JuicyFields sent out an invitation to the webinar "Legalization of Medical Cannabis in New Markets", to be held on 29 September at 17:00. Three experts were presented. One of them was Kai-Friedrich Niermann, and he was presented with a particular credential.

The credential, then, was that he was legal advisor to the European hemp industry's own organisation. That was the authority the company had bought into.

And that authority reached further than the trade bodies. During 2021 Niermann's firm KFN+ published "The Recreational THC report for Germany 2021". Two authors are named on the cover: Burkhard Blienert, then a former member of parliament and political advisor, and Niermann himself. Niermann promoted the report on LinkedIn, and Blienert shared the post on his own account.

In January 2022 Blienert was appointed the federal government's drug commissioner. When the news came, Niermann shared it with the words "Congratulations to my dear friend".

None of this is remarkable in itself. A lawyer publishes a report, a politician writes it, congratulations follow an appointment. Blienert is not a subject of this investigation, and nothing in the material suggests he knew of JuicyFields.

The line was not only on paper. In another post Niermann describes a meeting in person: "Meeting with the Federal Drug Commissioner of Germany this morning in Berlin with the board of LEAP Germany. Good discussions about how to regulate cannabis to improve the work of law enforcement."

It says something about what the company got for its money. The man whose name was placed on JuicyFields' speaker card had a documented line into German drug policy at the highest level. He was not one lawyer among many. And when he congratulated the incoming drug commissioner, JuicyFields' chief executive was among those who liked the post.

On 24 September, at 12:27, just under three hours after the invitation went out, a warning was sent to Niermann's published office address. The warning contained an arithmetical example: the promised return presupposed roughly 25,000 kilos of dried flower in seventy days. The letter set that against Aurora, one of the world's largest listed producers, which on the sender's account had sold around 16,000 kilos in an entire quarter.

The calculation anyone could do

That arithmetic is the core of this entire investigation, and it requires no inside knowledge of the company. It requires only public statistics.

Germany's entire import of medical cannabis across all of 2021 came to 20,770 kilos, just under 21 tonnes, dried flower and extract combined, from seventeen countries. The Bundesopiumstelle at BfArM sets the figure out country by country: Canada 6,493 kilos, Denmark 3,726, the Netherlands 3,724, Portugal 2,413, Australia 1,566, and so on down to New Zealand at a single kilo.

JuicyFields' promised return presupposed roughly 25 tonnes in seventy days. A single company would thus, in a little over two months, have produced more than all of Germany legally imported in an entire year.

But this does not only appear in a warning letter. The company said it itself, publicly. On 10 September 2021, fourteen days after the Berlin fair, a press release went out over the news distributor GlobeNewswire headlined "Tech Platform JuicyFields Plans to Produce 75 Tons of Harvest in 2021". Seventy-five tonnes. The material was syndicated onward to Yahoo Finance and remains published today.

That is nearly four times Germany's entire legal annual import, announced in advance, on a channel the industry reads.

And the ceiling is not a market question but a matter of international law. Germany reports an annual needs estimate for medical cannabis to the UN's narcotics control body, the INCB, and import permits may not exceed it. When the ceiling is reached, permits are paused. The system is public, and the figures are published.

That is why the volume is decisive. An outsider could believe it. Anyone working in the industry had the comparison figures as their profession.

That applies to one of them in particular. Niermann has stated himself that his engagement for Juicy Grow GmbH consisted of compiling "the relevant legal information for the medical cannabis market as well as the recreational cannabis market" in Germany. The rules of the German market were, in other words, literally what he was paid to map, at the same time as the company paying him publicly announced a harvest near four times what the country imported. The engagement ran from July to October 2021. The press release came in September.

And it applies to the trade paper. Krautinvest covers the import statistics as a subject of its own. Before the company fell it had published at least fifteen articles on imports, exports and volumes, the first as far back as February 2018. Seven of them carry the name of the editor-in-chief, the same Moritz Förster who moderated the panel with the company's business development officer in Berlin. The publication still did not write a line about JuicyFields while it was going on.

How little stood behind it appears from the company's own material. Five weeks before the collapse the incoming chief executive wrote to the owners that they needed to acquire greenhouses "that actually exist".

No one in the industry pointed out the arithmetic publicly while it was going on. Either they did not see it, or it did not weigh more than what there was to lose by saying it out loud.

On 29 September, five days after the warning, the webinar took place.

Svenskhampa has the warning email with its full mail header. It went on 24 September 2021 at 12:27 to `k@kfnplus.de`, the address the law firm itself gives on its website, and the sender has allowed the editors to see it. He does not wish to appear by name, and is therefore not named here, nor through any detail that could identify him.

What is established, then, is that the warning was written, that it went to the right address, and that it went five days before the appearance. What happened to it afterwards is not established. A published office address receives a great deal, and nothing in the material shows that the email was read.

At the turn of 2021 into 2022, JuicyFields' newsletter listed Niermann among «Meinungsführer, die mit uns zusammenarbeiten».

What Niermann says himself

On 6 June 2023 he published a statement on his own website, canna-biz.legal, in German and English. He explains there that he had until then been prevented by attorney-client privilege, and that he had now been released from it.

He confirms a paid engagement:

"I acted as legal counsel for Juicy Grow GmbH from Berlin in the period July 2021 to October 2021. The focus of the consultancy was the regulatory environment for cannabis in Germany... I was therefore commissioned to compile the relevant legal information for the medical cannabis market as well as the recreational cannabis market."

"I billed a total of €5,500 in legal fees for my activities, at the usual hourly rate of €250 per hour. I did not work for any other companies in the Group. I was not requested for any further work after November 2021."

The webinar of 29 September he states he took part in without a fee.

He further rejects a number of more far-reaching claims that have circulated about him, among them about payments and about his role in the company's decisions. Parts of them have been published on juicyfieldscase.com, a site run by the same person who publishes Svenskhampa. They rest on anonymous accounts. Svenskhampa does not repeat them and takes no position on them. What is carried here is what Niermann has confirmed himself and what stands in JuicyFields' own material.

The statement cuts both ways.

The engagement ran from July to October 2021. The warning came on 24 September, in the middle of that period. When the email reached his published address he was under engagement to Juicy Grow GmbH, and five days later he appeared in the company's webinar.

But the mandate ended in October 2021. The newsletter listing him among «Meinungsführer» came after that. The company went on using his name after he had stopped working for them, which is not something he controls.

The man with the titles

The second person in the material stands in an entirely different position. He was not an invited guest on a stage. He carried the company's own titles.

From December 2021 Shlomo Booklin appeared on juicyfields.io under the heading "Our beloved Potvisers".

On 14 February 2022 the company went further. In a post headlined "JuicyFields creates a Quality Control Team" it announced that Booklin had become Director of Quality Control and that his wife Lauren Booklin had become GMP auditor. He would continue visiting the partner grows and, according to the text, carry out "a strict audit that ensure that partners maintain the same high standards".

In the newsletter of 18 May 2022, reporting from a board meeting four days earlier, the titles are written out: Shlomo Booklin, Chief Operating Officer. Lauren Booklin, GMP Auditor.

The credential that recurred in the marketing was "Master Grower for Tilray and MedReleaf in Canada". The Tilray connection can be substantiated: The Globe and Mail published, on 8 April 2015, a photograph captioned that Shlomo Booklin is holding a cannabis plant at Tilray in August 2014. The caption gives him no title.

Lauren Booklin's EU GMP auditor certification comes, according to her own biography, from ECA Concept Heidelberg, a private training company, and ran from 2019 to 2021. She additionally holds an "Award in Good Manufacturing Practices" from the Malta Medicines Authority, 2021, that is, from a regulator. The auditor certification was completed the same year, and she was presented by JuicyFields as the company's GMP auditor the year after. The distinction between a course certificate and a regulatory accreditation belongs here; it does not mean the qualification is invented.

In June 2022 the company called him its chief operating officer outright, in its own social channel.

On 7 July 2022 he stood on stage at ExpoCannaBiz in Colombia. Behind him hung the sponsor wall, with JuicyFields among the diamond sponsors.

This is decisive for the whole story. JuicyFields' account was that it grew and sold to the German market under GMP. The two people whose names were to guarantee precisely that were the company's own chief operating officer and the company's own GMP auditor. Their names were used in the marketing aimed at investors.

What the owners were told

Everything above is the company's outside. There is one document from the inside.

On 5 June 2022, five weeks before the collapse, Willem van der Merwe wrote a fourteen-page confidential memo to the shareholders of JuicyFields AG, addressed c/o von Luxburg and Robert Laibach, following a meeting in Vaduz and what he calls his own due diligence since the beginning of May. He was on his way in as chief executive.

What he reports to the owners is this:

«The juicyfields.io platform being regarded a "Ponzi" scheme and currently being investigated by at least 5 different government departments in Europe.»

«The total lack of transparency on the use of the investor funds, and the perceived (deliberate or otherwise) deceit by company management as to the so-called cannabis plants procured, cultivated and sold by the Juicy Fields company to pharma clients for profit.»

Under the heading of immediate measures stands the demand that says everything about what existed:

«Procurement of one or maximum three legitimate greenhouses that actually exist, with license approval and accreditation to cultivate pharma grade cannabis plants.»

Greenhouses that actually exist. After two years of selling plants to hundreds of thousands of registered users.

And in the same document stands Booklin, not as marketing but as function:

«DACHA-DUBE 40,000 sq. meter, state of the art, glass grow houses that I will make available to Juicy Fields. Shlomo Booklin, the Juicy Fields expert has already visited and verified the status quo of this facility.»

«I doubt that Shlomo Booklin and a number of other key people in Juicy Fields will continue.»

This is the company's incoming chief executive writing, to the owners, in a confidential document. There Booklin is "the Juicy Fields expert" who has already visited and verified a facility, and one of the "key people in Juicy Fields". Five weeks before the collapse, then, he is the man sent out to check grows, in the company's own internal language.

The reader should at the same time know who wrote the memo, and that is not straightforward. Van der Merwe warns the owners of a Ponzi arrangement, but in the same document he offers the company his own greenhouses: DACHA-DUBE, forty thousand square metres.

Two years later the South African newspaper Sunday World described what had happened to that very company. On 28 April 2024 the paper reported that van der Merwe and two business associates had been reported for fraud after international investors paid some 3.5 million euros to Dacha Corporation for the cultivation, harvest and sale of medical cannabis. According to the complaint, around twenty million rand was moved on to his wife's account. Police confirmed that the case had been registered at the Dieprivier station in Cape Town on 15 April 2024 and handed to the commercial crimes unit.

It is a complaint, not a conviction, and the question of guilt has not been tried. But it says something about the nature of the document. The man who warned the owners that the money was disappearing into a facade was at the same time selling in a facility of his own, and that facility is now the subject of a fraud complaint of its own.

One further name belongs to the company's internal leadership. The person who had represented JuicyFields outwardly under the name Erika Misela resigned a month before the collapse. The name was an alias, and not her first. In Recyclix she had appeared as Izabella Vancane, in JuicyFields as Erika Misela. Behind both stands Isabella Sivaks, daughter of co-founder Alexander Sivaks. She never carried the title of chief executive. That was held by others, most recently van der Merwe, who took over when she left. But in the material describing the company's internal leadership it is she who gives the instructions and the formal executives who receive them.

Afterwards

On 19 and 20 July 2022, eight days after the exit, ICBC was held in Berlin. On the panel "Cannabis Cultivation In Europe & Beyond" stood one name with a title.

The following summer Booklin was registered in ICBC Berlin's own attendee register ahead of the 2023 fair.

How the investors themselves understood his role can be seen in the company's own Telegram groups in the weeks after the exit. There he is called for, in August 2022, with the words:

"Why doesn't anyone ask Shlomo, he should know more being financial adviser and crop overseer"

"Shlomo, Mr. Financial adviser and crop overseer, where are you"

That is not the company's marketing. It is the affected investors' own picture of who had vouched for the grows.

The car

On 29 June 2023, a year after the exit, a gold-coloured Lamborghini pulled up outside the Estrel Hotel in Berlin, where ICBC was being held. On the door it said "Juicy Fields DAO".

The same day Lars J. Olofsson, who represents affected investors, had a cake pushed into his face in the middle of a journalist's interview on the fair grounds. Police were called to the scene.

The cake is the part of that day that exists in pictures. Three other things happened as well, and they have not been described before.

A journalist who was at the fair was approached on his way out by a man who told him not to speak with Olofsson again. The journalist has confirmed the incident to the editors and agreed to its publication, but does not wish to appear by name, nor to be described in any way that would make him identifiable. The reason he gives is fear. He does not wish the man to be named either.

The publisher of this paper was approached the same day outside the fair by a person who said that a friend of his was named on juicyfieldscase.com, and demanded that the site be taken down. On the way back to the hotel the publisher was assaulted and struck in the face.

That part does not rest on an account alone. A complaint was filed on 6 September 2023, and the Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin opened an investigation for assault, `Körperverletzung`, against an unknown perpetrator under case number 241 UJs 2/25.

On 11 December 2025 the senior prosecutor discontinued the investigation. The reason stands in the decision:

«ich habe das aufgrund Ihrer Strafanzeige eingeleitete Ermittlungsverfahren eingestellt, da es nicht gelungen ist, einen Täter zu ermitteln.»

The discontinuation means, then, that the perpetrator could not be identified. It is not a finding that nothing happened. The prosecutor writes in the same letter that the investigation will be resumed if new information emerges within the limitation period.

That the publisher of this paper is himself the injured party in that case is something the reader should know. The events are set out because they belonged to the same day and the same place as the rest, not as a claim about who was behind them. None of them has been tied to any named person, and that connection is not made here.

Krautinvest, INCBA and Cannavigia

Lisa Haag runs MJ_UNIVERSE GmbH and publishes the trade paper krautinvest.de. The paper was founded in March 2017 by Moritz Förster, who is still its editor-in-chief; since 2019 it has been published by Haag's company. She stood on ICBC's stage in 2021, on the panel "On the road to legalisation". MJ Universe's own website describes it this way: "Lisa Haag together with future trends expert Rebecca Wiegärtner, clinician Dr. Jan Witte and the now acting drug commissioner of the Federal Republic of Germany Burkhard Blienert", with her own clarification "(note: prior to his appointment)". Witte is the same Jan Peter Witte who stood on ICBC's speaker card that year, two places from JuicyFields' chief business development officer.

At the same fair the paper's founder sat on stage with the company. The panel "Emerging Markets", shown at the top of this article, was moderated by Förster, and among the participants sat JuicyFields' Daniel Gauci. The still is taken from the fair film, which JuicyFields produced themselves and which ends with the line "All rights reserved, JuicyFields Media, Juicy Network Ltd. Malta, 2021".

Moderating a panel is not vouching for the people sitting on it, and the organiser sets the list. But it places the paper's founder on the same stage as the company, at the fair the company was title sponsor of, a year before the publication wrote its first line about the matter.

Ahead of ICBC and Spannabis in Barcelona, Haag hosted a networking event whose banner names the sponsors.

A like is not a connection. The image shows an industry socialising, not a crime. It stands here because it shows how small the circle was.

Special Agents

Haag's company MJ Universe GmbH sells consulting services. On the company's website there is a page called Special Agents, a listing of the experts a client can gain access to. The page describes them as "our team of dedicated experts".

The oldest capture in the Internet Archive dates from 27 January 2024. The editors additionally hold a screen recording of the same page from 10 April 2023, nine months earlier, with the same names listed. Who stood there before that cannot be determined, and this text therefore makes no claim to describe the situation during the JuicyFields period.

At that point, eighteen months after the exit, those listed included:

• Kai-Friedrich Niermann, Lawyer KFN+
• Michael Knodt, Independent Journalist, Greenthumb Media
• Lauren & Shlomo Booklin, GxP & Cultivation & Horticulture, SB Consulting

Three of the names this investigation concerns, then, on the same list, at the same company. Among the others stands, among more, the pharmacy owner Melanie Dolfen, who was also on ICBC's speaker card in 2021.

Krautinvest's own "expert community" in turn lists Niermann, Alex Rogers and Haag herself.

And two of the credentials JuicyFields later built on she had published herself.

On 21 June 2020 came a krautinvest interview in which Niermann is described for the first time as «Legal Advisor der EIHA». The text is written by Lisa Haag. On 29 December 2020 krautinvest published a profile of the Booklins. That too is written by Haag, and mentions neither JuicyFields nor her own role in the industry.

Both came the year before the company began using the same credentials in its marketing.

One instance can be dated precisely on both sides. On 16 January 2021 krautinvest described Shlomo Booklin as having worked «etwa als Master Grower für Tilray und Medreleaf». On JuicyFields' own website the same pairing appears in English, in three Internet Archive captures of `juicyfields.io/contacts` taken on 3 December 2021, 17 January 2022 and 25 January 2022: a "prestigious position of Master Grower for Tilray in Canada and MedReleaf in Canada". The wording was not copied but rewritten, with the country added. The same pairing turns up again on a conference poster in Spanish, «Master Grower para Tilray y MedReleaf en Canadá».

What that shows is that the credential travelled. It does not show that the trade paper had any part in what the company did with it, and no such claim is made here.

Appearing on a consultant listing is not blameworthy, and nothing in it suggests a crime. It is noted because it shows what the circle looked like afterwards as well: when the platform had fallen and the money was gone, the company's former chief operating officer, its engaged lawyer and the journalist who wrote about the matter all stood on the same list, at the same person's company.

Cannavigia, registered as Vigia AG in Zurich, sells traceability and compliance software to the cannabis industry. After the exit Shlomo Booklin was engaged by the company. This is confirmed in writing by Luc Richner, one of the company's founders and at the time its chief executive. He left the CEO post in September 2024 and is today Chief Strategy Officer.

On 18 April 2023 at 13:24, juicyfieldscase.com, the publisher's own site, published a piece about Booklin in which Cannavigia is named. Just over an hour later, at 14:46, Richner wrote: "please call me asap as i dont understand how and why we are being dragged into something we have nothing to do with !" Fifty minutes later came this.

The statement never came. The next day the account was blocked and the messages deleted. They survive only because they were recorded on screen as they were being written, with the clock and activity URL visible.

It should be said plainly that Richner's first reaction was to distance himself and offer to speak publicly. That is not blameworthy conduct. The question that remains is why it stopped there, and why the traces of it were removed.

The journalist

Michael Knodt is a freelance journalist who writes about cannabis. He was on MJ Universe's Special Agents list in January 2024, he publishes with krautinvest, and he was on ICBC's speaker card for the Mediterranean Retreat 2022 together with Haag, Niermann and the fair's own owner Alex Rogers.

And he did something no one else in this text did.

In early September 2021, ten months before the exit, Knodt wrote to BaFin about JuicyFields. He quotes his own letter in an article of 28 September 2022. BaFin replied citing confidentiality. The Berlin police did the same.

That should come first, and it should be stated clearly. A journalist who approached the supervisory authority in the autumn of 2021 cannot be described as someone who protected the company.

Svenskhampa has been through krautinvest's entire archive via the Internet Archive, 11,734 unique addresses across all preserved years. The publication wrote nothing about JuicyFields before the collapse. The first text came on 23 July 2022, after the exit, and contained the editors' own self-criticism: «Diesen Schuh müssen wir uns rückblickend leider anziehen.»

Three texts exist in total. The first came twelve days after the exit. What they contain is as interesting as when they came.

Knodt's chronicle, «Chronik eines Scams» of 28 September 2022, follows the corporate structure backwards and does so thoroughly: that JuicyFields AG in Switzerland was called Luxburg Carolath Holding AG until the end of 2021, that the holding company had owned all shares in LC Med AG since 2019, and that a Liechtenstein fund bought that company in 2021 for forty million euros despite it running at a loss. Three aristocrats are named: Stefan Ludwig Graf von Luxburg, Ulrich Maximilian Johan Graf von Luxburg and Jörg Wolfgang Prinz von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.

None of the industry figures is named. Not the lawyer who took a paid engagement from Juicy Grow GmbH, not the consultant who carried the company's titles, not the fair that had it as title sponsor, and not the publication's own place in the circle.

The count can be repeated. In the chronicle's 2,549 words the name Luxburg appears nine times. Niermann, Haag, Rogers, Booklin and ICBC appear zero times each.

What the chronicle does do should be said at once, because it counts in its favour. It names the company's own officers, and it goes to the register to do so:

"Ein gewisser Alan Glanse repräsentierte die Juicy Fields GmbH öffentlich als CEO, während im Handelsregister der Berliner Viktor Bitner als Geschäftsführer eingetragen war."

It further notes that Bitner withdrew from Juicy Grow GmbH in the spring of 2022, that the South African Willem van der Merwe then stood in the imprint, and it cites the finance blog Blendbuster's article of 3 August 2021. That is the same early warning that was linked in the letter to Niermann seven weeks later.

What is missing from the chronicle, then, is not the company's officers. It is the industry around them.

The journalist Marguerite Arnold has asserted that Haag and Knodt "only published story of fake count, Graf, they did not go beyond that". The word "only" does not hold; there are three texts. Nor does "did not go beyond that" hold: the chronicle goes to the commercial register and names the company's own officers. What the review shows is something narrower than her claim, namely that the industry figures are never named.

What he wrote privately

On 7 July 2023, a week after ICBC in Berlin, a person in the industry received an email from Knodt. The sender had asked what he made of the JuicyFields scandal, which had hung «wie eine Wolke» over the fair.

Knodt first answered briefly: «bitte prüfe erstmal die Quellen von Olafsson. Ich halte ihn für einen Betrüger, der auf der Welle mitschwimmt und parallel abkassiert von den Opfern.» Four days later came a list of claims about the affected investors' counsel, and about this paper's publisher.

Two of them can be checked, and both are wrong.

Knodt wrote that the publisher owns fifty per cent of the company behind the litigation and had thereby gone «vom Opfer zum Profiteur». Daniel Johansson owns zero per cent of Prio Startup AB. That Svenskhampa's publisher is himself the person named should be stated plainly, and it is also the reason the claim is checked against the company register rather than against his word.

The claim was also publicly disputed when it was new. Under Michael Knodt's own video on YouTube the publisher wrote, in the same comment that carries the apology Haag and Förster later invoke:

"We have evidence that you have defamed us by email to journalists saying that i (Daniel Johansson) own 50% of priostartup AB, Lars company. I dont own 50% and never have. Where did you get this information from?"

The question in the comment, where the claim came from, remains unanswered.

Knodt wrote further that the case against Facebook was hopeless and would not be admitted. The case existed, and it was covered by both TV4 and SVT in November 2022. TV4 reported 487 plaintiffs from 43 countries at Luleå District Court; SVT, the following day, around 800 people from 56 countries. That the Supreme Court later did not grant leave to appeal is a different thing from a case never having existed.

The email ends: «Ich checke alle Leute, die ich interviewe, vorher genauer ab.»

Where the claims came from

Three months earlier, on 10 April 2023, an employee of Lisa Haag wrote to the publisher:

"Krautinvest.de tried to get info on the trial, contacted relevant courts in sweden, and was informed there is no trial."

Krautinvest had done the research, then. Who subsequently said what to whom does not appear, and Svenskhampa asserts nothing about it. The question has instead been put to Knodt: did he check himself, or did he receive the information from someone else? He has not replied.

The silence

Two people have independently approached Knodt about JuicyFields and received no answer.

On 27 September 2023 one of them, who had warned Niermann two years earlier, wrote that he had written to Knodt and never had a reply.

And on 16 September 2023 Carsten Elfering, who had known Knodt for years, described a meeting at a trade fair:

"i started the conversation with some questions about the upcoming legalisation, he was very talkative, and he told me he was really happy to see me... Everything was fine till i mentioned Juicy fields. From one moment to another his mood changed, he said he will not answer any questions regarding Juicy fields and went away. Did not even give me the chance to make one question."

Elfering added his own interpretation of what he saw in Knodt's face. It is not reproduced here, because no one can read another person's fear from a single moment. What remains is the act: he turned around and left.

And one publication worth noting

On 30 March 2023 krautinvest published an interview with Andreas Becker and Nicolas Martin, the two Deutsche Welle journalists who made the podcast about JuicyFields. The interview is headlined «Ausgedachtes Universum» and is written by Moritz Förster.

The publication that had not written a word about the company while it was going on thus interviewed, eight months after the collapse, the journalists who had investigated it.

The date is worth noting. The interview came eight days after Deutsche Welle's Russian-language service published the details that exposed the podcast's own source, and shortly before that text began to be altered after the fact. That sequence is dealt with in a separate investigation.

What a planned exit requires

A reflection belongs here, and it is the editors' own.

What happened on 11 July 2022 was not a bankruptcy. It was a departure, and those who carried it out had done it before. Recyclix lay behind them, with the same shape and partly the same circle.

Anyone planning a departure plans two things. The first is how the money comes in, and that is the easier part. The second is how you get away afterwards, and that is the part that requires architecture.

Both parts are documented in this material, and they are built from the same kind of material: things that look like something they are not. The company's own incoming chief executive wrote to the owners of "deceit by company management as to the so-called cannabis plants", and asked them to acquire greenhouses "that actually exist". That was the facade that brought the money in.

And the outside had a second facade. The company that received the money in Switzerland was called Luxburg Carolath Holding AG right up to the end of 2021. The names on the documents were aristocratic names. Chief executives were swapped out and the last took office five weeks before the collapse. None of those who built the fraud stood on the papers.

When it broke, the coverage landed exactly where the papers pointed. The chronicle of the fraud followed the aristocratic structure, the holding company, the funds and the register. That is correct journalism on the material that was available, and nothing in it is inaccurate.

But it says something about what a well-built facade does to the reporting about it. The real principals were named only much later, by others, and they were never on a company document. What there was to write about was what had been set out to be written about.

What Lisa Haag says herself

In February 2024 Haag wrote to a platform on which Olofsson had appeared. The core of the letter is this:

"I have never worked for JF. He never went after the agencies or people who actually worked for JF on a big scale... He put things in connection that are totally unrelated. They also infringed my copyright as a publisher. He has few investments and is neither a successful lawyer (not registered with any BAR) nor was know up until recently. They have been harassing literally everyone, from German TV editors via Deutsche Welle Podcast to particularly myself. With a platform like yours, you should not give him the visibility and even help him get more clients to scam."

That is her position, in her own words. She denies every employment relationship with JuicyFields, and this investigation does not claim otherwise. What is set out above is sponsorship, media partnership and shared stages. That is something other than employment, and the difference should not be blurred.

In their joint response of 2 September 2026 Haag and Förster go further and put it categorically: neither krautinvest nor MJ Universe has ever received advertising money, sponsorship payments, consulting fees, commissions or any other remuneration from JuicyFields or Juicy Grow GmbH, and no krautinvest article was ever paid for by the company. Advertising enquiries came in, they write, but no business followed and no advertisement was published.

They also answer why nothing was published before the collapse. They distinguish between research, publication and publication readiness, and write that serious allegations against a trading company cannot be published on suspicion alone. Krautinvest, they note, is a small independent specialist paper without an in-house legal department. Their first reference, they say, came in the routine monthly press review for July 2022, published on 2 August, and Knodt's investigation followed once it was ready to stand up factually and legally. The editors' review of the archive shows an earlier text, however, "Juicy Fields: Wie konnte es soweit kommen", preserved in the Internet Archive on 23 July 2022. It is also among the sources they themselves cite. They point out that Deutsche Welle's own reporters described the same problem in krautinvest's interview with them: that they too had researched the company before the collapse and needed time before their work could be published.

Their central objection to this article is one of method. They call it guilt by association: that people are linked to JuicyFields merely by having been interviewed by krautinvest, having belonged to the MJ Universe network, or having appeared on the same programme. Sharing a stage, they write, means an organiser invited both people, and establishes nothing further. Their response is published in full.

The editors have also heard her speak about the matter herself, in a series of voice messages. There she gives her own explanation of why Booklin remained on the consultant listing after the collapse:

"I still have Shlomo in my list of special agents because like I talk to Shlomo plenty of times. Shlomo don't work for them, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. He messed up another opportunity that was there because of that and he ruined his entire career... I know Shlomo for a very long time, I know he's in for the right reasons and I know he destroyed his career and I didn't want to let him down because he made one bad decision."

That is a declaration of loyalty, and it should stand as one. She states, then, that she repeatedly advised him against working for the company, and that the listing was kept because she did not want to abandon a friend.

In another message she describes the sponsorship as something the whole industry accepted:

"Literally all the people from all events took money from JuicyFields. It was not only Alex Rogers, it's all the events took money, all the events took sponsoring, except for Ulrich. He didn't."

The account is hers, and it is not independently confirmed. It is reproduced because it comes from someone who was inside the circle, and because it describes the same thing this text documents from the outside.

That she turned to a platform in order to have an opposing party removed from it is, however, a fact in itself. It is the same method that recurs in this material: not rebuttal, but removal.

There is one further account, and it is directed at the person who publishes this paper. A colleague of Haag's has told the editors what Haag said about him: that he was supposed to have threatened to kill her cats, and that he would send Hells Angels and the Russian mafia after her. In the colleague's message to the publisher on 10 April 2023 the words "Russian mafia, hell's angels type of" recur. The colleague does not wish to appear by name.

The claims are unsubstantiated, and they concern Svenskhampa's own publisher. They stand here nonetheless, for two reasons. The first is that an investigation cannot leave out the accusations directed at itself. The second is that they belong to the same pattern as the rest of this section: not a rebuttal on the substance, but a description of the opposing party designed to make him impossible to listen to.

Haag was put to the account. She denies it. In her response she states that she never made the statement attributed to her about this paper's publisher, and asks how it is relevant at all. Her denial stands here beside the account, and her response is published in full.

He turned out to be right

In July 2022, in the days after the exit, Deutsche Welle's reporters travelled to ICBC in Berlin. They had planned the trip long before the platform died. What they found they described this way in the third episode of the podcast Cannabis Cowboys:

"In Berlin, there was no trace of Juicy Fields at all. No people, no booth, no Lamborghinis, no party, not even a company logo anywhere."

The fair catalogue had also changed character. In Barcelona it had been a glossy brochure with articles and advertisements. In Berlin it was "only a bunch of black and white photocopies stapled together", and without a line about JuicyFields.

Then they asked the organiser.

DW: "Juicy Fields, it was a big sponsor of this event, no?"

>

Alex Rogers: "Yeah, well they're not a sponsor anymore, of reasons I won't disclose personally, but maybe people can figure that out."

Asked whether organisers ought to be more careful before accepting money, he answered:

"Here's the deal, how do you vet a business when you have a conference? So in any business, you'll find players who are shady... I'm sure it was small time compared to what some of these big multinational companies are doing to us every day."

Asked whether it stings to lose a sponsor like that:

"That's really no one's business, but mine."

And asked whether he had been surprised:

"I heard about it like Monday. Yeah, it's an abrupt thing... but it'll be blown over in a month and nobody will ever remember it, because this industry is so strong. Otherwise to concentrate on one bad player is misrepresenting the industry as a whole."

That was not a forecast. It was a description of how the industry works, and he knew what he was talking about.

One thing in his answer bears noting. The reporter called the company "a big sponsor of this event", and Rogers did not object.

Count the days. The exit came on 11 July 2022. Eight days later Shlomo Booklin stood on ICBC's speaker card in Berlin with the title Chief Cannabis Strategist, JuicyFields. The logo remained in the sponsor box on the fair's own front page until August. The exhibitor list was not cleared until September, two months after the money disappeared.

Who took the place

The title sponsor slot on the Berlin page did not stand empty for long.

Wayback captures of the same page on 5 July 2023 and 19 June 2024 show the headings "TITLE SPONSOR" and "2024 TITLE SPONSOR" respectively, with a logo and a link to thetalmangroup.com. After 2024 ICBC names no title sponsor at all.

The sequence on the fair's front page is therefore this: JuicyFields, JuicyFields, the organiser's own company, the organiser's own company, none.

And what the fair became

Two weeks before that fair, on 15 June 2023, a company was registered in Ljubljana: The Talman Group, d.o.o., registration number 9417095.

The company is Rogers' own. ICBC's own website describes him on 11 February 2024 as "owner and CEO of the International Cannabis Business Conference and co-founder of the Talman Group". Talman's own website lists him as chief executive. The company aggregator companywall.si lists him as director and sole owner, but that has not been confirmed in a Slovenian primary register.

The operation is small. The company turned over 13,000 euros in 2023, reported 0.21 employees, and has run at a loss every year since. At the end of 2025 its equity stood at minus 75,704 euros. The domain was registered on 1 June 2023, the company on 15 June, and the fair was held on 29 and 30 June.

Today Talman runs a conference series in Berlin, Brussels and London. And in February 2024 the company convened, according to ICBC's own text, a conference in Slovenia's National Council, with the Council's president, the health secretary in the prime minister's office, the director-general of the public health directorate and two state secretaries among the participants. Talman is described there as leading "a coalition of advocates... working diligently to educate Slovenia's government".

Between those two dates lies a third. In September 2023 ICBC held a conference in Slovenia, and on the panel "Emerging International Markets" sat Kai-Friedrich Niermann. The panel board names him with his firm, and the photograph was taken by the daily newspaper Delo.

The company was registered in June, the fair was held in September, the lobbying of the National Council came in February. This is not a relocation, it is a construction, and the same lawyer is part of it.

Lobbying a government is lawful, and nothing in it suggests a crime. It stands here because it is the same mechanism this whole text is about, now with the direction reversed. The fair lent its authority to JuicyFields. Today it borrows authority from a national council.

Four years on

Four years after the exit there is no judgment, anywhere. The Spanish case at the Audiencia Nacional is still at the investigation stage, and according to a police report from February 2026 it may continue for more than another year. The German prosecution announced in November 2024 cannot be confirmed as having been brought.

Where the line has been drawn

Europol arrested nine people in April 2024. The detentions that have taken place since have concerned people identified as involved in the fraud itself, of several nationalities.

None of the industry figures in this text has been the subject of any known proceedings. None of them is named in the investigation Correctiv, Spiegel, ZDF and Paper Trail Media published together in November 2024, nor in German reporting more broadly. No trade body has conducted a review or expelled anyone. No fair has offered an explanation. Searches for comparable European cases give the same picture: the prosecutions are directed at those who took the money, never at those who lent their name.

That is five absences in a row, and all of them are documented.

Svenskhampa levels no accusation at any authority. Investigations prioritise, resources are finite, and whoever stole the money should reasonably be pursued first. But it is worth noting where the line has been drawn, and that it lies in the same place in every country.

The firm that changed sides

One name from the ICBC Berlin 2021 speaker card belongs here again. Peter Homberg was presented there as a partner at Dentons and head of the firm's European cannabis group, two places along from JuicyFields' business development officer.

On 29 January 2026 the law firm Schirp Schmidt-Morsbach, which represents affected investors, announced that it had filed four further damages claims against iSX Financial EU Plc in Cyprus, the payment service provider through which the investors' money was collected and channelled. The same announcement states this:

«Vertreten durch die nach eigenen Angaben weltgrößte Anwaltskanzlei Dentons hat iSX versucht, uns zahlreiche Aussagen zu ihrer Verstrickung in den Juicy Fields-Skandal gerichtlich untersagen zu lassen.»

The case was heard at the Landgericht Berlin under case number 2 O 471/25 eV. The outcome was that iSX «vollumfänglich gescheitert» and had to bear the costs.

The firm whose European cannabis head shared a stage with the company in 2021 thus, four years later, represented the money's infrastructure, in an attempt to bar the affected investors' counsel from speaking about the matter.

Three qualifications belong here, and they are material. Homberg was no longer at Dentons when this happened. He left the firm in 2024 and took up a partnership at gunnercooke in January 2025. He died in December 2025 and cannot answer any of this. Nothing in the open material connects him personally to the engagement for iSX. Dentons is moreover one of the world's largest firms, and one department taking an engagement says nothing about a former partner in another. Representing a client is a lawyer's profession, not a position on the question of guilt. Which office and which lawyers conducted iSX's case does not appear from the press release, and the question has been put to Dentons, which has not replied.

Most of them are still working in the same positions. Kai-Friedrich Niermann submitted a written expert opinion to the Bundestag's health committee in March 2023 and is today co-chair of INCBA Europe, the same organisation whose Barcelona event Haag hosted. The fair that had the company as title sponsor is much larger today than it was then.

And the circle still shares a stage. On 15 May 2025 the organiser's new company held a conference in Brussels, with sessions at Slovenia's EU representation and the Fondation Universitaire. There Lisa Haag moderated the panel "How Smart Regulation Fuels Cannabis Innovation and Investment", with Peter Homberg, then at the law firm gunnercooke, among the participants. An hour earlier Kai-Friedrich Niermann had moderated the panel "Unlocking EU Cannabis Markets", with Finn Age Hänsel among the participants. On ICBC's published speaker list for Berlin in April 2027 stand both Haag and Niermann, as well as Hänsel and Burkhard Blienert, today a senior advisor.

Four of the names in this text, plus Finn Age Hänsel, who wrote the letter to Rogers, and the politician who gave the keynote, on the same two programmes. It is not a claim of anything improper. It is a description of the fact that nothing changed.

The positions reach further than the stages. On 17 December 2021 Lisa Haag, for MJ Universe GmbH, was elected to the presidium of Branchenverband Cannabiswirtschaft, the German cannabis industry's own association. The association's member list describes the company as "ein Publisher für digitale Produkte wie z.B. krautinvest.de".

The timing belongs to the matter. The election fell almost exactly midway between the police confirmation in May 2021 and the exit in July 2022, that is, during the period when the publication wrote nothing about JuicyFields. Two weeks earlier, on 3 December 2021, Shlomo Booklin was up on juicyfields.io under the heading "Our beloved Potvisers". Niermann's paid engagement for Juicy Grow GmbH had ended in October, two months before the election. Both later appeared on MJ Universe's Special Agents list, but when they were added to it cannot be determined, and nothing is claimed about that here.

Two and a half years later, on 14 May 2024, the association held its parliamentary evening in Berlin. The keynote speaker was Federal Minister Cem Özdemir.

Sitting on the board of an industry association is legitimate, and nothing in it suggests anything improper. It stands here for the same reason as the rest of the section.

Forbes' article about JuicyFields from 21 June 2022, three weeks before the exit, remains online without an editorial note.

Who actually said something

Several in the circle have appeared after the collapse as the people who saw through the company. That is worth setting against what is actually documented, and it works best as a list.

Everything they published came after the exit. Krautinvest did not write a line about JuicyFields while it was going on, which has been checked against 11,734 archived addresses. The first text came twelve days after the money was gone. The only documented action before that is Knodt's letter to BaFin in September 2021, and that should count in his favour.

They work with two of the company's own. On the same consultant listing stand the lawyer who invoiced Juicy Grow GmbH and the consultant who carried the company's titles. There they still stood in January 2024, eighteen months after the collapse.

And the platform they operate on was paid for by the company. The fair accepted JuicyFields as title sponsor for at least eight months after the police notice, as party sponsor in Barcelona, and let the company's chief operating officer speak eight days after the exit. At the same fair, krautinvest's founder moderated a panel on which the company's business development officer sat.

At the same time the work was directed at the opposing party. Knodt described the affected investors' counsel as a fraudster in an email to a third party, with two checkable factual claims that are both wrong. Haag turned to a platform to have the same counsel removed from it.

The work of naming those responsible was done by others. The Swedish counsel Lars J. Olofsson and one of the company's former employees both took part in Danmarks Radio's documentary about the case, and Olofsson subsequently published the identities behind the platform, including the man who had run it under a pseudonym. In April 2024 Europol arrested nine people in the matter.

None of those who lent their name to the company did any of that.

That is the cost of standing beside it: none. It is also the explanation for why so many did, and why the next company will be able to buy the same thing.

Why so few speak

One thing recurs in the work on this text. Almost no one will answer.

Deutsche Welle's reporters noted the same when they covered ICBC: that people in the industry turned away as soon as JuicyFields came up, and that it seemed peculiar. At that point it was not obvious why.

It became so later. The international consortium of journalists has described links to Russian organised crime and to Russian intelligence, and reported on murder contracts. Danmarks Radio has documented how the company's former chief executive Willem van der Merwe was subjected to violent threats and how Molotov cocktails were thrown at him in Italy.

Several of those who have provided information to this investigation do so on condition that they are not named. A couple have said that they or their families have been threatened. That is the reason the text in places says "a source" instead of a name, and the reason some information is not published at all.

The silence in the industry is therefore not necessarily indifference. But it works the same way.

Right of reply

Everyone named in this article was put to every statement concerning them. The requests went out on 19 August 2026, to all of them on the same day, with the same deadline and on the same terms.

Those requests carried a reply address that could not receive the answers. Svenskhampa's address had no MX record between 28 May and 28 August 2026, and mail that did reach the server was refused with `554 5.7.1 Relay access denied`. Any reply sent in that period had nowhere to arrive. The fault was ours alone.

Lisa Haag and Moritz Förster answered within the deadline. Their answer did not reach us for the reason above, and Haag additionally told us of the delivery problem. Nothing in this article is to be read as a failure on their part to reply. Their response is published in full and unedited, and is linked from every point where either of them is named.

The address was repaired on 28 August 2026 and tested. Every request was reissued on 2 September with a new deadline of 9 September 2026. That deadline has passed. Apart from Haag and Förster, none of those approached has replied.

Lisa Haag was also asked to forward the request to Shlomo and Lauren Booklin. She declined.

Answers that arrive after publication are published as well.

Sources

• Landeskriminalamt Berlin, LKA 325, reply of 26 May 2021 concerning juicyfields.io. Copy in the editors' archive, recipient's name masked. The document carries the load-bearing sentence "Das Unternehmen Juicy Grow GmbH ist bereits Gegenstand von Ermittlungen" and refers explicitly to "Ihren Hinweis vom 21.05.2021". The signature gives Michael Kitschke, Kriminalhauptkommissar, LKA 325 Anlage- und Kapitalmarktdelikte, Columbiadamm 4, 10965 Berlin. Preserved as a photograph of the reply, posted in JuicyFields' own Telegram group on 26 May 2021 at 11:03, with checksum.
• Kai-Friedrich Niermann's LinkedIn post about The Cannabis Expo in Johannesburg, with the speaker card contained in it. Preserved as a screenshot with a visible status bar, 20:53 and 57 per cent battery. The card gives "THE CANNABIS EXPO, 18-21 NOVEMBER 2021, THECANNABISEXPO.COM" and carries the JuicyFields logo. The post had 51 reactions, four comments and three shares, and Alan Glanse is shown at the top as having liked it. Editors' archive, with checksum.
• ICBC Berlin 2021, the fair's own speaker card and social media posts.
• National Cannabis Industry Association, NCIA Today, 16 July 2021.
• Invitation to the webinar "Legalization of Medical Cannabis in New Markets", sender support@juicyfields.io, 24 September 2021 at 07:44 UTC. Message id RVV9SQ-TRM7R2-GWEJJN-DE6PH6. The mailing presents Niermann with the words "Kai is also legal advisor to the European Industrial Hemp Association". Original email with full mail header in the editors' archive, with checksum.
• JuicyFields' promotional film "Two years", still from the webinar of 29 September 2021.
• JuicyFields' partner page, `juicyfields.io/partners`, archived in the Internet Archive on 24 September 2021 and on 18 May 2022. Under the heading "Our partners" appear, among others, Sabores Purpura, Terra Cann Colombia, CannaYeza and The Cannabis Expo.
• JuicyFields newsletters, sixteen dated mailings between June 2021 and June 2022. Editors' archive.
• JuicyFields forum post "JuicyFields creates a Quality Control Team", 14 February 2022.
• ICBC Berlin, speaker card for the panel "Cannabis Cultivation In Europe & Beyond", 19 and 20 July 2022.
• ICBC Berlin B2B, attendee register, screenshot 6 June 2023.
• Lauren Booklin's biography on cannabisalud.com, archived in the Internet Archive on 17 January 2025. The site no longer responds. The certifications are stated there by her.
• "Insider Trading: The Olofsson Juicy Fields Litigation Team Names Other Highly Connected Facilitators", juicyfieldscase.com, published on 18 April 2023 at 13:24 and last modified on 10 May 2023. The preserved version is the Internet Archive capture of 30 May 2023. The site is run by the same person who publishes Svenskhampa.
• Luc Richner, LinkedIn messages of 18 April 2023, screen recording with visible clock and activity URL.
• INCBA Europe, LinkedIn post about the networking event in Barcelona.
• MJ Universe, "About", archived in the Internet Archive on 27 January 2024. The company's own caption to the panel photograph reads: "Panel: On the road to legalisation ICBC 2021 - Lisa Haag together with future trends expert Rebecca Wiegärtner, clinician Dr. Jan Witte and the now acting drug commissioner of the Federal Republic of Germany Burkhard Blienert (note: prior to his appointment)." The image file on the company's server is named `B2B Day 2 - 1400 - Road to Legalization - Group.jpg`. Local copy with checksum in the editors' archive.
• Lisa Haag, written message in February 2024.
• Lisa Haag, six voice messages in the editors' archive. The quotations are transcribed and checked against the audio.
• The events at ICBC Berlin on 29 June 2023: accounts from a journalist present, who has confirmed the incident and consented to publication on condition that he is neither named nor described in a way that would identify him, and the publisher's own account.
• Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin, decision of 11 December 2025 discontinuing the investigation into assault against an unknown perpetrator, case number 241 UJs 2/25, following the complaint of 6 September 2023.
• Sunday World, "Cannabis entrepreneur and associates face R70m fraud charges", 28 April 2024.
• "Confidential Memo", Willem van der Merwe to the shareholders of JuicyFields AG c/o von Luxburg and Laibach, 5 June 2022, fourteen pages. The case document book, editors' archive.
• Delo, "Legalizacija konoplje je le pol poti", 10 September 2023, with a photograph by Črt Piksi from ICBC Slovenia 2023.
• Messages from a colleague of Lisa Haag to the publisher on 10 April 2023, preserved as a screen recording of 2 minutes 8 seconds with a running clock in the taskbar. The two quoted messages are timestamped 09:44 and 10:27 that same morning. In the recording the colleague describes her own employment, and she has requested anonymity.
• Correspondence between Lars Olofsson, Marguerite Arnold and Michael Knodt of 11 May 2023, original email in the editors' archive. It carries Arnold's account of the warning to Alex Rogers in early August 2021 and of the two lawyers, two years before this text was published.
• BfArM, Bundesopiumstelle: «Aus welchen Ländern wurden im Jahr 2021 welche Mengen Cannabis zu medizinischen und wissenschaftlichen Zwecken nach Deutschland importiert?», published 29 August 2022. The table sums to 20,770 kilos from seventeen countries.
• "Tech Platform JuicyFields Plans to Produce 75 Tons of Harvest in 2021", press release via GlobeNewswire, 10 September 2021. Syndicated onward to, among others, Yahoo Finance, AccessNewswire and Blockchain Magazine. All still published.
• Deutsche Welle, the podcast Cannabis Cowboys, episode 3 "Up in Smoke". The quotations are taken from the editors' own transcription of the episode.
• `juicyfields.io/contacts`, archived in the Internet Archive on 3 December 2021, 17 January 2022 and 25 January 2022. All three carry Shlomo Booklin's profile under the heading "Our beloved Potvisers" with the wording "Master Grower for Tilray in Canada and MedReleaf in Canada". Local copies with checksums in the editors' archive.
• Krautinvest, «Novel-Food-Sammelantrag der EIHA: Rechts- und Planungssicherheit», 21 June 2020, bylined Lisa Haag. The interview presents Niermann as «Rechtsanwalt und Legal Advisor der EIHA». Byline and date checked against the live page; local copy with checksum in the editors' archive.
• Krautinvest, 16 January 2021, on quality in cannabis cultivation, EU GMP, CACP and Covid-19: the article in which Booklin is described as having worked «etwa als Master Grower für Tilray und Medreleaf». Archived copy in the editors' archive.
• ExpoWeed, conference poster for Shlomo Booklin, with the credential «Master Grower para Tilray y MedReleaf en Canadá». Editors' archive.
• `mjuniverse.net/special-agents`, oldest capture in the Internet Archive on 27 January 2024, and the editors' screen recording of the page on 10 April 2023.
• `krautinvest.de/expert-community`, archived 2020 and 2022.
• Krautinvest's articles on imports, exports and volumes: compiled from the Internet Archive's complete URL index for krautinvest.de, supplemented with the paper's own topic tags. Fifteen articles published between February 2018 and June 2022; authorship taken from the articles' own structured data.
• ICBC's own page `internationalcbc.com/berlin/`, archived in the Internet Archive in some thirty captures between January 2021 and October 2022.
• ICBC's press piece about Barcelona, 27 December 2021. The sentence about the party's sponsor reads, in the Internet Archive capture of 6 July 2022, "This year's after-party will be sponsored by Juicy Fields", and in the capture of 10 December 2022, "This year's after-party will be sponsored by Cansativa". The live page today carries Cansativa and its original date, with no note of amendment. Both archive captures and the live page saved locally with checksums.
• Kai-Friedrich Niermann, "Aus gegebenem Anlass – Due to a given occasion!", canna-biz.legal, 6 June 2023.
• The warning email to `k@kfnplus.de` of 24 September 2021 at 12:27, preserved as a screenshot with the full mail header and as forwarded text. Both in the editors' archive, with checksums. The sender has requested anonymity, and his address and signature are therefore blacked out in the published image.
• JuicyFields' own Telegram groups. The export `JuicyFields English Backup`, messages dated August 2022 with timestamps in UTC+01:00. Editors' archive.
• The name count in "Chronik eines Scams": made against two archived versions of the text, 28 September and 9 December 2022, both in the editors' archive.
• Finn Age Hänsel, public posts on LinkedIn, 2 May 2024.
• "The Juicy Fields Files: Where Was Finn Hansel and Sanity Group?", juicyfieldscase.com, 2 May 2024. The email of 16 August 2021 is reproduced there in full, with sender, date, recipient line, copy recipients and subject line. The site is run by the same person who publishes Svenskhampa.
• TV4 Nyheterna, «Hundratals stämmer Zuckerberg – i tidernas största cannabishärva», 29 November 2022.
• SVT Nyheter, «Mark Zuckerberg anklagas för medhjälp i cannabishärva för miljarder – stäms i Luleå», 30 November 2022.
• Company extract for The Talman Group, d.o.o., registered 15 June 2023 in Ljubljana.
• BvCW, "Neues Präsidium beim Branchenverband Cannabiswirtschaft e.V. gewählt", published 19 December 2021. The election was held on 17 December. Lisa Haag is listed for MJ Universe GmbH, Dirk Heitepriem for Canopy Growth Deutschland GmbH as vice president.
• BvCW's member list, where MJ Universe GmbH is described as "ein Publisher für digitale Produkte wie z.B. krautinvest.de".
• BvCW, "Parlamentarischer Abend 2024", 14 May 2024 in Berlin-Mitte. The page gives Jürgen Neumeyer as opening speaker, Federal Minister Cem Özdemir as keynote speaker and Dirk Heitepriem as newly elected president. The page's own caption reads "Gruppenfoto der BvCW-Mitglieder und Mitarbeiter" and names no participant. The identification of Haag, Özdemir and Neumeyer in the photograph is the editors'. The original file was retrieved from the association's server at 4000 x 1800 pixels, with a checksum in the editors' archive.
• ICBC on Alex Rogers and the Talman Group, 11 February 2024.
• The Talman Group's own management presentation, thetalmangroup.com.
• ICIJ Offshore Leaks, local copy, search on all names on 16 August 2026: no hits.
• The identity behind the alias "Erika Misela": company register documents and personal records in the editors' archive. The name became public in connection with the arrests in the matter.
• Schirp Schmidt-Morsbach Rechtsanwälte, press release on further civil claims against iSX Financial EU Plc, EQS-News, 29 January 2026.
• Europol, "9 arrests in EUR 645 million JuicyFields investment scam case", 11 April 2024.
• Correctiv and others, the consortium's publication on JuicyFields, 8 November 2024.
• ICBC's own page `internationalcbc.com/berlin/`, archived in the Internet Archive. The capture of 12 December 2019 shows "1-3 April 2020", that of 12 April 2020 "29-31 July 2020 - NEW DATES", and that of 17 June 2020 no dates at all but a "Virtual Global Symposium" in the menu. The Berlin fair therefore did not take place in person in 2020.
• JuicyFields' own fair film from ICBC Berlin 2021, with the panel board for "Emerging Markets" and the end card "All rights reserved, JuicyFields Media, Juicy Network Ltd. Malta, 2021". Editors' archive.
• Krautinvest on its own background: founded in March 2017 by Moritz Förster, published since 2019 by MJ Universe GmbH.
• "The Recreational THC report for Germany 2021", KFN+ Law Office, with Burkhard Blienert and Kai-Friedrich Niermann named as authors on the cover. Niermann's and Blienert's posts about the report on LinkedIn, screenshots in the editors' archive.
• Niermann's LinkedIn post about Blienert's appointment, "Congratulations to my dear friend", with the shared article "SPD-Politiker Blienert soll neuer Drogenbeauftragter werden", Berliner Sonntagsblatt. Screenshot in the editors' archive.
• The Talman Group, the programme for Talman Brussels on 14 and 15 May 2025, with the panels "Unlocking EU Cannabis Markets" and "How Smart Regulation Fuels Cannabis Innovation and Investment".
• ICBC's published speaker list for Berlin, 14 and 15 April 2027.