The Public Interest

Hello, reader! Let us refresh our memory of our protagonists' companies, because without this introduction, it will be difficult to appreciate the scale of what comes next.

You will remember: the organisational chart you already know features three owners and beneficiaries of a structure made up of two companies, Orca Cyber Security LLC in Dubai and Al Masdar Investment W.L.L. in Qatar. If we recall the ceremonial version of this story, what we have before us is a rather impressive little empire. Orca Cyber Security owns a unique cybersecurity programme with no equal anywhere in the world, the creation of Malte Liedtke. Al Masdar Investment is a Qatari royal investment fund with assets under management exceeding a billion dollars: chaired, with such careful stewardship, by Sheikh Saud Abdulaziz Al-Thani, professionally managed by ex-global-CEO Dr Henrik Christiansen, and run, day to day, by that same Malte Liedtke. You must admit, with such a combination of titles, capital, and talent, a reader can be forgiven for feeling a certain confidence in tomorrow.

And so our conglomerate plans to land in Germany, for serious business, of course.

The landing begins with Malte Liedtke's arrival from Qatar. In late 2023 he takes a job as a project manager at a perfectly respectable company called MaxSolar, puts in a year there, and in January 2025 they let him go. A few months later a curious metamorphosis begins to happen to some of his former colleagues: one by one, they find themselves inside our heroes' structures. Put more simply, Malte actively poached them.

And there is, of course, nothing improper in that. From a business point of view it is even commendable: our conglomerate has arrived to develop actively, it needs experienced staff, and for some reason it needs them mostly from the solar energy sector. That, it seems, is the plan. More on it later.

Nobody would have followed Malte on his own merits alone, of course. For all his charm and charisma, he had been working as a project manager and driving a company Passat, and from such a starting position it is rather difficult to convince former colleagues that you personally set up a multi-billion-euro business. There were attempts, all the same, and that is a story for another day. What actually did the convincing was something else: a sheikh from the royal family standing behind the project, government contracts with Qatar either promised or already in place, and the wise stewardship of a highly experienced super-CEO. It was precisely this combination that created the favourable climate in which people uprooted their settled lives.

The salaries on offer, meanwhile, were generous. In some cases, remarkably so. And there would be nothing strange in that either: an investment structure with billions in declared assets can certainly afford to pay properly for someone else's expertise, especially given that part of the working time was meant to be spent in Qatar, which, take it from me, is no picnic, and yes, generally comes with a premium attached. Last but not least: brand new BMWs were promised, and quite a few people actually got them as company cars. A small thing. But a nice one.

Up to this point, we could have been looking at a perfectly ordinary story of business growth, if a rather ceremonious one.

The problem is that the salaries never arrived.

First came one explanation, then another, then a third. According to the people I spoke to, the list of reasons why the money was always just about to arrive eventually became long enough to deserve a novella of its own.

Some people kept working, others left, new people took their place, and some, as far as I know, remain in these structures to this day. Many have families, some have children, some had savings that let them survive the first delays. They waited, because they believed the promises, because they were relying on signed contracts, and because they wanted to be paid for their work. I see no grounds whatsoever to accuse them of naivety here: agreeing to work for an agreed wage should not require any particular talent for judging human decency.

And now I have to move on to the part where I no longer feel like joking at all.

According to the information I have gathered, as of the date this text was prepared, not a single employee has been paid. And yes, you read that correctly, my friend. Nobody.

I will repeat that without any literary decoration, because the scale of it is easy to miss: this is not one delay affecting one person, but non-payment across all seventeen employees I have been able to identify.

My well-informed reader most likely knows that in Germany, social contributions are due regardless of whether the salary is actually paid out. So no, those are not being paid either.

The social contributions raise a separate question of their own. I will not pretend to be a lawyer, but I have a fairly strong suspicion that the German criminal code has a paragraph or two written with exactly this situation in mind. That is simply how it seems to me, and I intend to check it properly. And if any lawyers reading this would like to contribute and set the record straight, I would, as always, be grateful.

So, then: behind these sums stand months of somebody else's work, and months of somebody else's waiting. While some kept talking about the business's prospects, others were spending family savings that, unlike promises, are actually finite. Promises, it turns out, can have a great deal more staying power than the people who have to live on them.

And from this moment, everything changes.

At first, when your humble correspondent kept finding traces of unpaid salaries here and there, one person, then two, the usual thought crossed my mind, as it always does: these things happen, payments get delayed, they meant to pay and the money did not arrive, business is like that sometimes.

But when I began noticing that some employees' contracts were formally ending without them ever having been paid, while their replacements went unpaid from the very first day, then, in my view, that was no longer a delay. That was a pyramid being built.

What I see here is people being knowingly drawn into financial distress, while the company itself continues to assume obligations it cannot meet and, more troublingly, appears to have no intention of meeting. And here is the main thing: all three beneficiaries of the structure communicated with these people personally, worked closely with them, and provided security and a driver to every member of their own families. They knew perfectly well that they were receiving these people's labour without paying for it.

And when the number of these people and the sum, in millions of euros, of unpaid salaries and taxes clicked together in my head, I realised that I was no longer looking at a few unlucky businessmen. I was looking at an organised group of people acting deliberately, cynically and, in my view, profoundly immorally.

And you know, there is something showing through all this that feels almost medieval: people treated like slaves, except slaves at least got fed and housed. And the same attitude towards legislation and the tax code, as though it were a substance that did not exist. Why? On the whole, there are considerably more questions here than answers.

I would like to put three very simple questions publicly to Sheikh Saud Abdulaziz Al-Thani, Henrik Halager Christiansen and Malte Liedtke.

• How is it that not one of your employees has been paid?
• How is it that social security contributions have not been paid either?
• When, at minimum, do you plan to settle with these people, and ideally with the tax authorities too?

And for the first two of those questions, I would like to call on three people who were direct participants in these events by virtue of their positions: Martina Hofstetter, Benjamin Abel, and Simon Groeger (born Simon Franz).

And I have one more, and rather large, request. To former employees, to current employees, to those who never quite made it to being an employee, to people who know anyone named above, and to anyone holding additional information that might be useful to this investigation: I need your help again. You can reach me completely anonymously, or with your name attached, whichever you prefer.

And, coming back to my earlier posts: you will remember that I have often used, still use, and will go on using the words public interest.

In my own clear conviction, and in my own moral universe, what has been described above is a perfect example of public interest.

When a problem touches dozens of people, a great many companies, and even the state treasury itself, through taxes that were never paid into it, then I struggle to imagine a cleaner example of public interest.

So then, however hard my protagonists try to silence the author and the people helping him, whether through threats, references to non-compete agreements, warnings about lost reputation, bans on finding anything out or digging any further, or any of the other means for discouraging questions, none of it will help, and none of it will stop the process that has already begun. Because you cannot gag the truth.

Please, if I am wrong, or if I have misread some event or fact, correct me. As always, I genuinely want to be wrong! Very much so!

This is probably my first dark post. But then, the subject itself is dark, insanely sad, and frightening. So let us go on investigating this case, gathering information. Perhaps, along the way, you and your occasionally over-curious correspondent may even help somebody else avoid becoming the next character in this particular story.

And, of course, reader, we are only just getting started.

Stay tuned. You may now do so in German.