This week Estonian police started a criminal investigation regarding the crowdfunding platform Envestio. The case is being investigated as investment fraud. According to figures from the Envestio website before it went offline, around 33 million euros in investor funds were collected from around 13,000 investors.

There’s no easy way to make money and p2p lending is tremendously great, however, mostly sold to people who wouldn’t otherwise put money at risk this much. I’m a big believer into P2P but haven’t seen a very compelling model yet.

Today I received an e-mail from Envestio, reacting on the recent developments around Kuetzal. Envestio reacts to panic on Baltic crowdfunding market, caused by collapse of Estonian platform Kuetzal, by returning its former COO Evgeniy Kukin back on his position. The end of 2019 on Baltic crowdfunding market has been quite challenging for all players, as failure of Kuetzal platform caused a crisis of trust and provoked many investors to withdraw their funds from the market. Envestio also faced a number of pre-mature investment buybacks and subsequent withdrawal of funds, which were accomplished without any delay and in full amount thanks to Envestio’s reserve fund, which in present circumstances varies from EUR 500 000 up to EUR 800 000. Furthermore, in order to minimize the room for negative rumors and speculations, caused by changes in the management board of Envestio, which took place almost simultaneously with similar changes in Kuetzal (due to absolutely different reasons, though – Envestio was purchased by a solid European investor) the new owner of Envestio, Mr. Arkadi Ganzin has reached the agreement with former COO of Mr. Envestio Evgeniy Kukin to return to this position starting from January 15, 2020. At the same time, Mr. Eduard Ritsmann, who was appointed to the position of COO and Development Director right after the sale of the platform in December 2019, will continue working for Envestio as the Head of Sales. Hence, no parallels should be drawn between Envestio and Kuetzal cases, as Envestio retains onboard the whole team of professionals, with which it became one of the leaders of the Baltic crowdinvesting market, earned trust of almost 15 000 registered investors, and kept perfect payment discipline as well as is in command of solid financial reserves to ensure uninterrupted and trustworthy operational activity.