The internal conflict of the company has gone beyond its scope and now the legality of the parties’ claims will be decided by the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation.
The project began with claims to create “the world’s first decentralized marketing platform HOQU.” But the millions collected during the successful ICO quarreled the co-founders.
Roman Kaufman, one of the founders of the marketing blockchain platform HOQU, in early September accused his business partners of stealing almost 75% of the investments raised during the token sale. According to Mr. Kaufman, during the successful ICO, according to the documents, $14.7 million was collected, but in fact - $27 million. In an article published on Medium, he accused the partners of withdrawing funds:
“In 6 months, one of the founders successfully transferred the lion's share of the assets and now all the information is hidden. Only Alexey Shmonov and Maxim Anikeev had access to finance. Trusting only the facts, I want to publicly ask again: where were 75% of all assets and almost $7 million immediately after the ICO withdrawn?
The response was immediate. On the company's official blog, the HOQU team accused Kaufman of extortion and unreasonably inflated demands for a bonus of 20% of all company fees.
For three weeks, the conflict flared up on the Internet. And now Roman Kaufman filed a statement with the police, claiming that the company’s founders illegally deprived him of a twenty percent share in the project by “removing” his name from the documents submitted during registration with the Federal Tax Service. Based on this statement, the Ministry of Internal Affairs began checking the facts and other founders of the startup were forced to give explanations about the situation to the police. Now the investigation of the conflict will pass to law enforcement agencies.
HOQU representatives previously assured investors that the internal conflict would not affect the team’s work in any way. According to the roadmap, the Merchant dApp should be demonstrated at the end of September. How the growing conflict will affect the project is still unknown.
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