Yep everybody would rather just forget Juicy Fields ever happened.
Daniel Johansson who has worked with Swedish lawyer Lars Olofsson highlighting the biggest scam (that we know of) in cannabis has recently penned the following article reminding us that none of the enablers even got a rap on the knuckles for their, quite frankly, entirely unprofessional and I’d suggest immoral behaviour.
The conferences, the lawyers and also the PR people who if i remember rightly had a Dubai connection, that tells you everything you need to know!.
Johansson is happy to name and shame in his piece and i could say a few more things about those South African conference people but life, to be honest, is too short.
Unfortunately this wasn’t the first cannabis pyramid scheme and it won’t be the last.
There were a number of pyramid schemes happening in the USA around the 2017-2020 that CLR’s investigative reporter at the time, Teri Buhl, traced most of them back to the type of Italian “organisation” they love to celebrate in Hollywood but not in Italy.
The Juicy Fields saga emphasizes that a combination of factors: small investors who are dumb enough that they think miniscule investments will magically fill their bank accounts, ever more efficient technology to market and sell a pyramid scheme that’s also equally efficient at hiding the perpetrators, law enforcement who just don’t have the resources to more than vaguely scrape the surface of what’s happend and of course then there’s the core of the problem ,a mafia state to the east that’s quite happy to let forces within that country engender asymmetric warfare/chaos into the western part of the continent. Unfortunately for cannabis it just became part of the same conversation and I imagine it’s all still going on in one form or another as we speak and we’ll find out about it after the fact once again.
Here’s the introduction to the piece
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.
Read the full article at
https://svenskhampa.se/en/the-german-industry-that-made-juicyfields-possible/
