A major player in the west coast CBD trade has been the center of multiple legal controversies in recent years, and interested parties across the industry have felt its effects.
Cura CBD is a company that has a massive footprint in the industry, and its manufacturer Sentia Wellness was recently beset by a $2.2 million new lawsuit for failing to uphold an agreement to purchase processing equipment.
Italian chocolate company TSW Industries planned to sell Cura CBD expensive chocolate processing machines, but after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that CBD in food and drink products would be treated as illegal, the need for the capital fell through.
This was coupled with the major problems Cura was facing. According to Oregon Live, the company has laid off 30 people in the past year.
And that’s not all: Cura CBD, native to Portland, was also purchased by a Massachusetts company, Cura Holdings LLC, last May.
The purchase, valued at around $2 billion, makes the dispute with TWS Industries look like small potatoes.
However, the beginning of Cura CBD was allegedly plagued by controversies that roiled the Portland community.
Oregon Live claims the man who started Cura, Shayne Kniss, has been accused of misusing investors’ funds before the startup found its footing.
Prosecutors alleged last year that Kniss had embezzled over $500,000 from contributors to the company that would later become Cura CBD, along with the now defunct Iris Capital Management, a “notorious” real estate scam, Oregon Live said.
Kniss denies any wrongdoing to this day, and Cura has settled out of court with as many as 50 separate complainants. According to OL, many of these parties are retired people who lost a combined total of $1 million in misspent investments from their retirement savings funds.
“Despite a years-long, court supervised receivership and a criminal investigation and guilty plea, nobody has ever accused (Cura) investors of having done anything wrong,” the firm said in a statement, according to a report by Oregon Live last May.
The company may well be telling the truth, but the newest lawsuit from TSW surely can’t help the firm.
Sources
[3] https://www.law360.com/articles/1295719/cura-partners-lied-about-thc-content-in-vapes-suit-says
