My previous Crowdestor recovery case study covered the budget version of debt recovery. One investor pursued operating borrowers directly, without first trying to take control of a failed platform or trace money through several countries.
Source: https://www.karsten.me/money/crowdestor-recovery-case-study/
This is the version with the big guns.
Envestio and Kuetzal were Estonian business-crowdlending platforms, the category commonly sold to European investors as P2P lending. Both stopped paying around the turn of 2020. Their creditors then had to organise hundreds or thousands of small claims, put a platform into bankruptcy, use criminal proceedings to freeze money and fund years of recovery work.
Sources: https://www.ametlikudteadaanded.ee/ee/Harju%20Maakohus%20Tallinna%20kohtumaja/pankrotimenetlus/pankroti-valjakuulutamine/2020/6/3/1614590; https://www.ametlikudteadaanded.ee/ee/Harju%20Maakohus%20Tallinna%20kohtumaja/pankrotimenetlus/lopparuande-kinnitamisega-pankrotimenetluse-lopetamine/2023/11/15/2152236; Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026.
The two cases began from different asset positions. A large part of Kuetzal’s investor money was still in the company’s bank account. In Envestio, around EUR 15.3 million had already been lent to businesses that later proved empty, dissolved or owned by people with nothing left, according to Marek Keiman, head of Fraud and Asset Recovery at Magnusson Law in Tallinn.
Magnusson helped organise investor groups in both bankruptcies. I asked Keiman what the firm did, what made one recovery easier than the other, how creditors can organise without surrendering their claims, and what any of this means for Ventus Energy lenders.
Sources: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026; https://www.magnussonlaw.com/people/marek-keiman/; https://www.magnussonlaw.com/
This written interview has been edited for length and reordered around the recovery process. The case figures come from Keiman’s answers and have not all been independently reconstructed from trustee reports. His Envestio figures are provisional because the estate remains open. His comments are general information, not legal advice or a recovery prediction. He did not independently verify my reporting on Ventus.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 and 20 August 2026.
The interview
Kuetzal creditors eventually received about 38% of their recognised claims. What made that case recoverable?
Marek Keiman: The answer is that everything happened quickly, and speed put money out of the reach of the people running the platform before they could move it on.
Kuetzal stopped paying at the end of 2019. We organised the investors, and their bankruptcy petition was in court in February 2020. In parallel, we opened criminal proceedings. As a result, a large part of what investors had paid in was still in the company’s own bank account and it was frozen there. Once bankruptcy was declared, the trustee applied to have the frozen money released out of the criminal case and into the bankruptcy estate, where it could be distributed. That step accounts for most of the recovered assets.
The creditors’ group also funded work in a number of other countries, and money came back from several of them: Hong Kong, Colombia, Malta, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Russia and Latvia. None of it would have been affordable without the value that had been secured at the start.
Money that is still somewhere identifiable can be secured. Money that has been moved usually cannot, or only at a high cost and difficulty. The window in which that is decided is measured in weeks and months, not years.
Sources: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026; https://www.ametlikudteadaanded.ee/ee/Harju%20Maakohus%20Tallinna%20kohtumaja/pankrotimenetlus/lopparuande-kinnitamisega-pankrotimenetluse-lopetamine/2023/11/15/2152236
Why has Envestio recovered less so far?
Keiman: I would not call it an outcome, because the case is not finished. The estate is still open six years on, the trustee is still selling claims against Latvian debtors, and we are still waiting for the results of ongoing criminal proceedings in Latvia.
Recognised claims of EUR 13,264,968.08. EUR 1,164,881.29 recovered into the estate. Costs of EUR 744,900.83. No distribution.
More than three thousand investors lost money on Envestio, on our own records of the case. Most of them acted together through a single vehicle. When a lending platform collapses, creditors are almost never arguing over a pile of money sitting in the company. They are trying to find money that has already been sent somewhere else. In Envestio it had gone before anyone got near the company. Around EUR 15.3 million had been lent out to businesses that turned out to be empty, dissolved, or owned by people with nothing left.
The investors put up EUR 200,000 between them. Estonian courts can close a bankruptcy before it starts if there is no money in the estate to run it, and the court asked for a deposit to prevent that. That money paid for the applications that secured property and vehicles in January 2021. Practically everything the estate has since brought in has come either from assets that were secured, or from proceedings that the secured value made it possible to fund.
Sources: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026; https://www.ametlikudteadaanded.ee/ee/Harju%20Maakohus%20Tallinna%20kohtumaja/pankrotimenetlus/pankroti-valjakuulutamine/2020/6/3/1614590
A note on the figures: in Keiman’s account, Magnusson organised the investor group and opened criminal proceedings alongside the Kuetzal bankruptcy petition. Once bankruptcy was declared, the trustee applied to bring the frozen money into the estate. The EUR 1,999,792 distributed in Kuetzal and the EUR 1,164,881 recovered so far in Envestio are estate figures. They are not amounts recovered only for Magnusson’s clients, and they are not Magnusson’s fees.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026.
Do investors need to transfer their claims to a special-purpose company?
Keiman: There are two ways of organising creditors and we have used both.
In Envestio and Kuetzal the investors transferred their claims into a single company, a special-purpose vehicle or SPV. That company then acted as one large creditor in the proceedings. In both cases, it held the claims of the great majority of the investors, which made it comfortably the biggest creditor in the estate and gave the creditors genuine control of the case. It also kept individuals away from the cost of being the creditor who files.
In the more recent Estonian platform collapses, CoinLoan and now Zondacrypto, we do it differently. We take each investor on as a client in their own right. No company is set up and nobody transfers their claim to anyone.
That second way has several advantages over aggregating claims under an SPV. Nobody has to put their claim behind one person’s judgment. With a vehicle, someone has to be appointed to run it, and that person then decides how the claim is voted, whether to settle and what to pursue, on behalf of everyone who joined. Where investors are represented individually, the lawyer acts for all of them and each investor keeps their own claim and their own vote.
There is nothing to maintain. A company has to be kept alive with accounts and filings for as long as the case lasts.
And no influence is lost. A coordinated group of individually represented investors carries exactly the same weight in the creditors’ committee election as a single assigned block, because what counts is the total value of the claims behind you.
One practical point from Envestio. Filing the bankruptcy petition can require the creditor who files to advance money towards the cost of the case, and no individual should carry that alone. It is dealt with by an agreement between the investors who fund it, with a cap on what each of them can be asked for, rather than by setting up a company.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026.
How large does an investor group have to be?
Keiman: The answer is not a number of investors. What matters first is whether there is money to run the process. If assets can be frozen early, the case can largely fund itself out of what has been secured, as Kuetzal did, and the threshold is low. If the estate turns out to be completely empty, as Envestio’s was, the creditors have to fund it themselves, and a group then needs a few hundred thousand euros of committed funding to be credible.
After that, size buys influence rather than viability. A small group can file claims and be creditors but cannot steer the case. A group holding around EUR 10 million of claims can fund a trustee to do real work, take a seat on the creditors’ committee and pursue claims to recover assets that were transferred away. Above EUR 30 or 40 million a group effectively sets the agenda.
For a company owing somewhere between EUR 60 and 94 million, that means a few hundred investors acting together, not thousands. Which is why the useful advice to any individual lender is to join something, and to do it now rather than after the first decisions have been taken.
The EUR 10 million and EUR 30 to 40 million figures are Keiman’s estimates from practice. They are not thresholds set by Estonian law.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026.
What makes a cross-border recovery expensive?
Keiman: Once there is enough money to run the process, three things drive the cost. Freezing assets abroad usually means putting up security against the risk of being wrong. Every country the money passed through needs local lawyers. And working out where the value went requires company and land register searches, valuations, expert analysis, payment records and sometimes insolvency proceedings against the recipients.
In broad terms, running proceedings in many countries over several years needs hundreds of thousands of euros. What brings the cost per creditor down sharply is scale, because the work is much the same for fifty creditors as for five thousand.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026.
What do criminal proceedings add to bankruptcy or civil recovery?
Keiman: Their real value is not a conviction. It is what a criminal investigation can freeze, and how quickly. Criminal proceedings are the fastest way of stopping money moving.
Filed early, by an organised group, with evidence a prosecutor can act on, they are worth a great deal. Filed late, individually, as an invitation to go and look, they achieve very little.
A prosecutor can obtain bank records, compel people to answer questions and use European instruments that no private claimant can. A criminal court can take the proceeds of an offence out of the hands of whoever received them. In Estonia a victim can bring a damages claim inside the criminal case, which is far cheaper than separate litigation. A criminal file preserves evidence and changes how everybody behaves in a negotiation about a repayment plan.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026.
What this could mean for Ventus
Ventus is now in court-supervised reorganisation, not bankruptcy. Keiman answered my questions before that proceeding began. The answers below address the asset structure, what a bankruptcy trustee could examine if bankruptcy follows, and why restricted cash may matter. They do not say that a Ventus bankruptcy has begun or predict that one will.
Source: https://www.ametlikudteadaanded.ee/avalik/teadaanne?teate_number=2640998
Ventus points to power plants and other visible assets. How much does that help its lenders?
Keiman: Start with who owes the money. Every loan agreement is with the Estonian company, Ventus Energy Group OÜ. That is the only entity an investor has a contract with, and it is the only entity an investor is a creditor of.
The plants themselves are one level further down. They are owned by Latvian operating companies in which Ventus holds a part share rather than the whole. So a Ventus investor is not the owner of a power station, and Ventus is not the owner of one either. Ventus is a part-owner of Latvian companies that own them, alongside other shareholders who have their own interests.
A Latvian operating company’s own creditors are paid first, including anyone holding security over it. What is left is divided between its shareholders, of which Ventus is one. What reaches Ventus then goes to Ventus’s creditors.
Sources: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026; https://www.karsten.me/money/ventus-energy-investigation/
I sent you my reporting on the Jugla and Dambis transactions. What could a bankruptcy trustee do with those findings?
Keiman: I have not verified this myself and I would not want it presented as established fact, but your own reporting describes two transactions that a trustee would look at closely. At Jugla, investors were told the asset carried no security, and a substantial pledge is said to have been registered in the sellers’ favour over the shares shortly after the purchase completed, ranking ahead of the equity investors were told protected them.
At Dambis, the company is said to carry over a million euros of prior debt, including a large loan from a private individual who is not identified, against a plant that earned a small fraction of its purchase price in 2024 and was switched off for part of the year because running it lost money. If those accounts are right, both are exactly the kind of transaction a bankruptcy trustee is appointed to examine and possibly reach back (overturn).
Sources: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026; https://www.karsten.me/money/ventus-energy-investigation/
How should lenders view the reported restriction at Paysera?
Keiman calls the restriction an advantage for recovery: “Frozen money is reachable money, which is more than can be said for most of what Envestio was chasing.”
Keiman: Whatever is restricted at Paysera, or anywhere else, is the most valuable thing in this situation, because it is the only money that is both identified and reachable. Money left outside an insolvency estate has a way of being absorbed by whoever is standing closest to it.
For Ventus, four things will decide it. How much cash can be secured now, while it is still frozen. What survives of the portfolio once the senior debt and the Latvian companies’ own creditors are paid. How much of what left the group at inflated prices can be recovered. And how quickly investors organise, which is the only one of the four that is in their hands.
Ventus stated on its 16 June lender call that more than EUR 2 million was restricted in one Paysera account. The amount, current status and legal preservation route are unverified.
Sources: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 August 2026; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh7zkVxNut0 (at 36:31 and 37:43); https://www.lb.lt/en/sfi-financial-market-participants/paysera-lt-uab
CoinLoan: What reachable money can make possible
CoinLoan, a centralised crypto lender rather than a P2P crowdlending platform, provides the large-scale version of the same lesson. Its estate secured cryptocurrency early, traced assets across exchanges and checked the company’s systems against the public blockchain. By November 2025, approximately EUR 95 million had been distributed against roughly EUR 193 million in recognised customer claims.
The case was far larger than Envestio or Kuetzal, yet the creditors’ committee had approved costs only in the low hundreds of thousands at the point Keiman reported the figures. That is not a complete cost figure, so it cannot support a precise ratio. But it illustrates the broader point: a large case with identifiable assets may be more recoverable than a much smaller case in which the money has already disappeared.
That is why the reported Paysera balance matters. Money secured now would not merely add to an eventual distribution. It could help finance the work required to find and recover more.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 and 20 August 2026.
What lenders can take from this
The practical advice has not changed since the Crowdestor case study: talk to a lawyer with cross-border Baltic recovery experience. Keiman’s firm has run three of these cases. The interview adds three things a lender might not have considered.
A frozen Paysera balance does double duty. Secured money is not just a future distribution to creditors. It is the budget for going after everything else. In Kuetzal, the frozen bank account funded recovery work across eight countries. In Envestio, where nothing was frozen in time, the investors had to put up EUR 200,000 of their own money before the trustee could begin. Ventus itself most likely holds no significant cash, and funds inside its Latvian subsidiaries are not automatically available to its creditors. If the reported Paysera balance can be preserved inside a bankruptcy estate, it could fund the proceedings without requiring investors to pay in even more, and finance the search for where the rest went.
A bankruptcy trustee can undo deals. Keiman describes the Jugla and Dambis transactions as the kind a trustee would examine and potentially reach back. That means the recoverable pool is not limited to what Ventus currently owns. Overpaid acquisition prices, extracted fees, and transfers to insiders or related parties could all be clawed back if a trustee establishes the grounds. The available assets are not just the power plants on the balance sheet. They are, potentially, the personal assets of every decision maker, seller, and material beneficiary whose transactions do not survive scrutiny.
Organisation is the only variable lenders control. The asset position, the Latvian creditor queues, and the legal status of the transactions are fixed. What is not fixed is whether investors act together, how quickly, and with how much claim value behind them. Keiman’s estimate: a group holding around EUR 10 million of claims can fund a trustee to do real work; above EUR 30 to 40 million, the group effectively sets the agenda.
Source: Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 and 20 August 2026.
As I wrote in the Crowdestor case study, one of the first steps for investors considering coordinated action is to speak with a lawyer. Relevant experience matters: not merely insolvency work, but cross-border asset recovery in the Baltics. Magnusson Law represented investor groups in Envestio, Kuetzal and CoinLoan. The results discussed here are estate-wide, not recoveries reserved for its clients, but they show that the firm has worked inside cases that returned substantial sums to creditors. Investors interested in discussing representation can contact Marek Keiman through his official Magnusson profile.
That is not a substitute for comparing fees, conflicts, strategy and engagement terms with other qualified firms. I receive no referral fee or other benefit from Magnusson.
Sources: https://www.karsten.me/money/crowdestor-recovery-case-study/; Marek Keiman, Magnusson Law, written answers by email to the author, 6 and 20 August 2026; https://www.magnussonlaw.com/people/marek-keiman/
Disclosure: I have no financial interest in Ventus Energy, Magnusson Law, or any competing platform or firm. I filed regulatory complaints against Ventus and criminal complaints against its decision makers in multiple jurisdictions. Keiman was not paid for this interview and has no editorial control over this article.
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