An Estonian crowdfunding platform is suing Jānis Timma in a Latvian court over a personal guarantee on a mezzanine loan to a company that went bankrupt. The court session is scheduled for April 1, 2026. Timma is the 65% majority owner of Ventus Energy, which at the time of the December 2025 investigation had raised €65.8 million from nearly 5,000 retail investors across Europe. That figure has since passed €80 million. The proceedings do not appear in any publicly available Ventus communication.
The platform pursuing the claim is Crowdestate, an Estonian crowdfunding service provider now operating under license 4.1-1/32 from the Estonian Financial Supervision Authority. This is not about Crowdestor, the failed P2P platform Timma founded where 69% of loans are in recovery. It is not about Ventus, the subject of a separate investigation published in December 2025. It is about a deal on a third platform entirely.
The Olaines deal is the one case where the full internal structure is visible, because it ran to completion and the documents are on file. What they show: a 20% management fee on EBITDA paid quarterly to Timma, even as the plants reported net losses year after year. An equity raise that brought in 285 new investors weeks after the group’s consolidated balance sheet showed negative €1.6 million in equity. And a personal guarantee to one set of investors while Timma’s own corporate network held secured claims ahead of them on the same assets.
The Investment
In early 2019, Crowdestate offered its investors the opportunity to participate in a mezzanine loan of up to €500,000 to SIA Olaines Enerģija (registration number 40203121756), a holding company for three natural gas cogeneration plants in Olaine, Latvia. The listing raised €360,200. The plants were operated through three subsidiaries: SIA Energoapgādes tīkli 1, SIA Energoapgādes tīkli 2, and SIA Energoapgādes tīkli 3. Each ran a cogeneration station with 0.99 MW of electrical output and 1.076 MW of thermal output, commissioned in September 2014. The group’s owners were Alvis Krasovskis (45%), Gatis Krasovskis (40%), and Armands Kovaldins (15%).
Luminor Bank held the senior position. Crowdestate investors sat in second position, behind a regulated bank. The listing advertised an expected return of 15.01%.
The deal included a personal guarantee by Jānis Timma.
Timma was presented in the Crowdestate listing as an energy sector specialist. The listing noted he had been CEO and shareholder of a 14 MW biomass plant in Riga since 2015. He was the CEO of the Latvian Cogeneration Association. He was presented as the credible operator backstopping the deal.
The audited accounts for the operating subsidiaries were publicly available at the time. They showed consistent net losses:
| Subsidiary | Year ending June 2017 | Year ending June 2018 |
|---|---|---|
| Energoapgādes tīkli 1 | -€76,431 | -€99,170 |
| Energoapgādes tīkli 2 | -€62,634 | -€26,894 |
| Energoapgādes tīkli 3 | -€73,452 | -€15,328 |
The FY2018 accounts for the first subsidiary were signed off on August 9, 2018, five months before Crowdestate investors entered. In each of those years, interest costs on existing debt and administrative expenses exceeded gross margins, turning operating income into net losses.
The plants entered bankruptcy. A court in Riga formally opened insolvency proceedings against SIA Olaines Enerģija on July 28, 2025 (case number C771510025, Judge Irina Augustāne). Crowdestate’s collateral agent is now pursuing Timma personally on the guarantee. The Riga court has scheduled a session for April 1, 2026.
Not the Only Investors in These Plants
The Crowdestate loan was not the last time retail investors would fund these assets. And with each round, Timma’s documented role grew.
In May 2019, four months after Crowdestate investors entered, Crowdestor opened its own fundraising round against the same Olaines Enerģija plants. The listing (CRP-1898, “Biomass boiler house”) raised up to €380,000 at 18.5% interest over 18 months. The stated purpose was to fund a new SPV, SIA Olaines BIOenergija, to build a 5 MW biomass boiler house in Olaine alongside the existing gas cogeneration stations. The new plant would sell heat to the same municipal district heating operator, AS Olaines ūdens un siltums. Timma appeared in that listing as a named consultant, described as “CEO and shareholder of 14 MW biomass boilerhouse in Riga.” His own network held pledges over the underlying assets at the time.
Then in May 2021, Timma returned to Crowdestor with a different structure. Under the listing “CROWDESTOR Energy Holding Round 01” (CRP-3033), he raised €276,392 from 285 investors in an equity structure. This time he was not a consultant. The confidential information memorandum names him as sole member of the management board, tasked with daily operational management and responsible for maintaining the company’s accounting records. The pitch was explicit: he would use the funds to acquire the Olaines Enerģija cogeneration plants and pool them with other energy assets into a holding company. That holding company would then be sold to a strategic international buyer at 8x EBITDA, delivering a projected 36.3% annual return to investors. The 3-year holding period was set to expire in May 2024.
Within two years, Timma’s documented relationship with these plants progressed from personal guarantor on the Crowdestate loan, to named consultant on the Crowdestor expansion loan, to sole management board member of the vehicle raising equity to acquire the plants outright. At each stage, his involvement deepened. At each stage, a new audience of retail investors was introduced.
The Olaines plants were labeled “Target 1” in a four-stage plan. The confidential information memorandum projected that the full holding, across all four stages, would raise €17.6 million in equity, take on €24 million in senior bank debt, and sell for €60.7 million. In Stage 1 alone, the memorandum projected a 52.6% target annual return during the holding period.
The same memorandum listed €1.6 million in “existing debt from LUMINOR bank and Crowdestate” as part of the Stage 1 capital structure. The Crowdestor equity raise was not presented as replacing that debt. It was layered directly on top of it. Crowdestor investors were funding the acquisition of assets already encumbered by loans from two other sets of creditors, one of which was the crowd itself through a different platform.
That detail matters beyond this deal. As documented in the December 2025 investigation, Timma has publicly maintained that Crowdestor and Ventus are completely separate businesses with no connection beyond himself. His own fundraising documents tell a different story: Crowdestor’s pitch deck for the Energy Holding explicitly incorporated Crowdestate’s debt into its financial model. These were not separate businesses that happened to share an owner. They were platforms whose capital stacks were structurally intertwined, with one platform’s investors sitting behind another platform’s investors on the same underlying assets, and the same man guaranteeing one group while holding secured positions through the other.
The memorandum also specified how Timma would be compensated. As management board, he would receive a 20% fee from achieved EBITDA, paid quarterly, plus 50% of returns above a 20% annual base return. This meant that even in periods when the plants were running net losses at the bottom line, any positive EBITDA would first flow 20% to management before contributing to investor returns.
The governance arrangements reinforced this concentration of control. Investors received non-voting preferred shares entitling them to 99% of dividends and liquidation proceeds, but Timma held sole operational authority. He appointed two of nine supervisory board seats. He also retained an option, after the 18-month fundraising period, to buy out any investor who had committed less than €10,000, at a price reflecting 26% annual interest. The structure gave investors economic exposure but left decision-making with the person raising the money.
The strategic sale never took place. The mandatory electricity purchase subsidy, which underpinned the plants’ economics, expired in August 2024. Olaines Enerģija entered bankruptcy in July 2025. The 285 equity investors in the Crowdestor Energy Holding have received no publicly documented payout.
The full sequence across platforms and investor audiences:
- January 2019: Crowdestate, €360,200 mezzanine loan, Timma as personal guarantor
- May 2019: Crowdestor, up to €380,000 loan for expansion SPV, Timma as named consultant
- May 2021: Crowdestor, €276,392 equity raise to acquire the same plants, Timma as sole management board
- August 2024: Government subsidy expires
- July 2025: Bankruptcy
- 2026: Crowdestate pursuing Timma personally in Latvian court
What the Financials Showed
The Crowdestor Energy Holding listing presented its investment case in EBITDA. The historical financials table showed group EBITDA of €600,000 in 2018, declining to €360,000 in 2020, with a projected recovery to €930,000 by 2022. That projection was based on a stated assumption that from 2022 onward, the plants would operate approximately 7,500 hours per year, a roughly 55% increase over the approximately 4,830 hours per station they had averaged since commissioning. The listing did not explain what would drive that increase in utilization.
The audited annual reports for the operating subsidiaries show that below the EBITDA line, interest costs on the Luminor senior loan, the Crowdestate mezzanine, and inter-company borrowings consistently turned positive EBITDA into net losses.
Consolidated internal financial statements for the Olaines Enerģija group, dated Q1 2021, show the picture at group level. For the quarter ending March 31, 2021, consolidated production costs of €1,012,301 exceeded consolidated revenue of €675,996. The group reported a quarterly net loss of €390,894. Total equity was negative €1,631,283. Total liabilities stood at €2,578,919.
The equity raise on Crowdestor opened in May 2021, weeks after this reporting period closed. Investors were being asked to fund the acquisition of a group whose liabilities exceeded its assets by €1.6 million.
The subsidy was not an indefinite backstop. The CRP-3033 listing itself stated that electricity could be sold under the mandatory purchase framework “up to August 2024.” The 3-year holding period from May 2021 ran to May 2024. The entire return scenario depended on finding a strategic buyer and exiting within a three-month window before the subsidy expired and the business model ceased to function.
Why This Matters for Ventus Investors
The Crowdestate lawsuit and the Olaines bankruptcy are historical events. They involve a different platform, different assets, and different investors. But several structural features of the Olaines deals recur in the Ventus model documented in the December 2025 investigation, and current Ventus investors may want to consider them.
The compensation structure. At Olaines, the information memorandum entitled management to 20% of achieved EBITDA before investors saw returns. At Ventus, the investigation documented loan agreements that permit deducting unspecified “fees and costs” from investor funds before they reach the project.
Equity raises into distressed balance sheets. The Crowdestor Energy Holding raised €276,392 from 285 investors weeks after the consolidated group reported negative equity of €1.6 million. Ventus Energy Group OÜ, the entity that is the contractual counterparty for over €80 million in mezzanine loans, has €4,166 in share capital and has not filed a single set of annual accounts.
The credibility of personal commitments. The Crowdestate deal rested on Timma’s personal guarantee. That guarantee is now the subject of a court claim. The same person’s credibility underpins Ventus’s pitch to its current investors, but with one notable difference: at Ventus, Timma has not offered a personal guarantee. The Crowdestate experience may explain why. A court will determine what the Crowdestate guarantee is worth. What Ventus investors can determine for themselves is that this time, no such commitment exists.
These are the same “Powerhouse” assets that appeared on the Ventus roadmap from its first blog post, marked for acquisition with retail investor money. The Olaines plants were the first entry in a pipeline that Timma would later scale through Ventus, presenting energy assets with declining fundamentals to new investors with forward-looking projections, acquired through entities he controlled.
The Guarantee That Was Not What It Appeared
A personal guarantee is supposed to mean one thing: if the company cannot pay, the guarantor will. Investors accepted lower collateral priority because a named individual with a track record in the sector personally promised to make them whole.
What the pitch did not disclose is that the same individual had a separate secured position over the same assets through his own corporate network.
Latvian commercial pledge records show that a series of pledges over SIA Olaines Enerģija and its three operating subsidiaries were registered in February and March 2018, before Crowdestate investors arrived. The pledgee on those documents is listed as Powerhouse Riga, SIA (registration number 52103099711).
As documented in the December 2025 investigation, Powerhouse Riga sits inside the Crowdestor corporate chain: owned through Energy development SPV OÜ, which is owned by Crowdestor OÜ, which is owned by Jānis Timma. The Latvian beneficial ownership register confirms Timma as beneficial owner from the company’s founding. Vīlandes iela 6-6, Riga, served as the operational headquarters of the Crowdestor network, the same building Ventus later purchased with investor money while the CEO doctored the valuation PDF to hide the Crowdestor connection.
So the structure Crowdestate investors actually participated in was this: Luminor Bank in first position, a Timma-controlled entity in a secured pledge position, and Crowdestate retail investors behind both. Timma then provided a personal guarantee to those same retail investors.
The guarantee and the pledge point in opposite directions. The guarantee told investors: “if this goes wrong, I will make you whole.” The pledge told the registry: “if this goes wrong, my network gets paid before you do.” Investors were told about one. They were not told about the other.
The Court Claim
Crowdestate’s investor update, shared with this publication, states:
“We are currently pursuing a personal claim against Janis Timma on the basis of his personal guarantee to recover the investors’ funds lent to Olaines Enerģija SIA. The court has scheduled a session for this matter, which is set to take place on April 1, 2026.”
This is a formal legal proceeding in which a licensed financial institution is pursuing Timma personally for investor losses on a deal he guaranteed.
Update Log
- 2026-03-05: An early version of this article had a typo in the introduction attributing the Ventus fund-raising numbers to December 2024 instead of December 2025
Sources
- SIA Olaines Enerģija, Latvian Commercial Register, registration number 40203121756
- SIA Energoapgādes tīkli 1, audited annual reports for periods ending June 30, 2016 through June 30, 2019
- SIA Energoapgādes tīkli 2, audited annual reports for periods ending June 30, 2017 through June 30, 2018
- SIA Energoapgādes tīkli 3, audited annual reports for periods ending June 30, 2018 through June 30, 2020
- Consolidated balance sheet and profit and loss statement, Olaines Enerģija group, Q1 2021 (period ending March 31, 2021)
- Latvian Commercial Pledge Register, pledge acts 100182399 through 100182491
- SIA Powerhouse Riga, Latvian Commercial Register, registration number 52103099711, including beneficial ownership and control chain data
- Crowdestate investor update, February 2026
- Riga City Court, insolvency case C771510025, decision July 28, 2025
- Crowdestate project listing, Olaines Enerģija SIA
- Crowdestor project listing CRP-1898, “Biomass boiler house,” May 2019: https://crowdestor.com/en/projects/details/1898-biomass-boiler-house/
- Crowdestor project listing CRP-3033, “CROWDESTOR Energy Holding Round 01,” May 2021: https://crowdestor.com/en/projects/details/3033-crowdestor-energy-holding
- CROWDESTOR Energy Holding, Confidential Information Memorandum, May 2021