Meet Malte Liedtke

A closer look at the biography of one of this book's principal protagonists.

Hello, reader. It is time I introduced you to another of the protagonists of this book. I will start much the way I started the last dispatch. No conjuring tricks. Public documents only, and only the things the man has said about himself. We will look at his background, get acquainted, and along the way notice one or two liberties he has taken with his own life story.

Let us begin with his LinkedIn. Ah. He has deleted it. At the end of June. But do not worry, reader, you have me, and I have people. So here are two copies of his work history, one from of this year and one from . Less than three months apart, so let us simply hold them up side by side.

What has gone? Al Masdar Green Energy W.L.L., where Malte called himself co-founder. Make a note of that name, by the way. It is an important company in this story and we will be coming back to it.

What has arrived? Novexis, where Malte is now founder, since June 2025, and now in Singapore. Though it is odd that he appointed himself ten months before all three Novexis companies were incorporated out there, on 15 April 2026. But then, you and I are getting used to this by now, are we not, my watchful friend?

ORCA, or ORC4, is still there. And for the life of me I cannot work out what it is with this group and dates. He puts himself there from December 2023, and Orca Cyber Security L.L.C. itself, as you no doubt remember, only came into the world on 3 July 2024.

Al Masdar Investment is still there too, and the same nonsense with the numbers. The company was created on 24 February 2024, and Malte started working for it three months before it existed, in November 2023. Although as it happens I know perfectly well where he was working from October 2023 until January 2025. More on that shortly.

And what about before 2023? For that, here are two more of his CVs, both sitting in the open, on and . Go through them yourself. There are small inconsistencies and small mistakes in them, but the general shape is clear enough: school, the army, a few years self-employed, then a trade qualification, then a stint as an operator at a large construction company, and after that Qatar, back in the military field, at KLS. Somewhere in the middle of all this there is also a diploma we will have to come back to.

A career like any other.

Why do I pick at things like this at all? Because your public image becomes part of your public offer, and once people are deciding partly on the strength of it whether to trust you as a partner, or with their careers, or with their place in a project, the standard is a different one.

So yes. Someone will check the dates. Someone will check the companies. Someone will check the education. Someone will put awkward questions to a good many of the people in this book. If you walk into big public business, if you are moving deals worth hundreds of millions, if you are inviting people to invest in you, or rather in ORCA, then be ready for the day when somebody opens your LinkedIn, your CV and the commercial register all at once, and then goes and has a word with your former colleagues.

That is called due diligence. No hard feelings.

Sadly, for some people in this book, it has become overdue diligence.