
“They don’t tell you and you don’t know.” “Nobody knows what the DOJ is looking at,” he said. In its filings, the SEC mentioned that Ignite had sought to delay the agency’s subpoena while a separate criminal investigation by the Justice Department wound its course.Īs for what those federal officials want, that’s anyone’s guess, Paul Bilzerian said. 28 to delay the subpoenas, a federal judge ordered the company to comply with the subpoena and cough up documents, which it did, Paul Bilzerian said. “SEC staff has uncovered information that indicates that (Ignite) may have filed public financial statements that include false or misleading representations regarding revenues earned and recognized in the company’s fiscal year ending December 31, 2020,” the agency wrote in a filing.Īfter Ignite filed motions on Sept. On May 20, SEC investigators served Ignite with a grand jury subpoena as part of an investigation into “a potential accounting fraud,” according to documents first unsealed Aug.

Uber is worth 80 billion, it has never had a profitable month since it started and it lost over 5 billion in one quarter last year.īut according to an ongoing wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in June 2020 by Curtis Heffernan, a former Procter & Gamble executive who briefly served as Ignite’s acting president, it was Ignite company cash that funded Bilzerian’s opulent lifestyle of constant yacht vacations to exotic locales – always surrounded by women in bikinis, always carefully documented for Bilzerian’s tens of millions of social-media followers. The business made headlines in the summer of 2020 when mandatory public filings revealed the company had lost nearly $50 million, nearly half of which the company reported spending on “marketing and promotion.”ĭan Bilzerian has defended his company’s record, comparing Ignite to big companies such as Uber that posted big losses. Ignite had made a brief and unsuccessful play for a share of the legal cannabis market in both the United States and Canada before public filings revealed the firm was hemorrhaging cash in ways that a later lawsuit alleged were suspicious.

The elder Bilzerian himself is a notorious one-time corporate raider who served time in prison for securities fraud and famously managed to hide most of a $62 million SEC judgment from being collected.īefore Ignite went private in August, investigators from both the SEC and the FBI subpoenaed the company for a vast number of documents, according to recently unsealed court records and Paul Bilzerian. Paul Bilzerian, who said he is now serving as an unpaid adviser to his son’s company, was speaking on behalf of Ignite because Dan was unavailable to comment.
