Tatsiana Zaretskaya of LaavaTech and Meliora
Another VIP speaker at the Family Office Investment Summit - Mrs. Zaretskaya (Татьяна Зарецкая). Also a member of Forbes 30 uder 30 list, like Mr. Versetti.
Native of Belarus, Mrs. Zaretskaya is the CEO of LaavaTech, a revolutionary Estonian startup that promises to cut elecricity costs for indoor farms by 90% — i.e. 10 times. Just like Versetti's Ambrosus, her startup is also endorsed by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT)'s EIT Food program.
I can’t express how excited I am to talk about my passion to the people who shape the future of investing. The summit is a private forum exclusively organised by family offices for family offices, ultra elite private investors, prominent business owners, Sheikhs, Royal family members, financial families and their private offices from around the world. (source: Tatsiana's facebook)
The panel she participated in was about “Safe Space, Governance in Action — as a tool for effective negotiations within family dynamics” and “how creating a Safe Space ensures a more effective and efficient Governance structure within the family and the enterprise”.
There were at least two more fitting panels — one about the future of food and another about artificial intelligence. Perhaps all seats on those panels were already taken, but since Mrs. Zaretskaya’s package (see the main summit post for package details) included a panel…
It appears that Mrs. Zaretskaya is not exactly selective in choosing means for her ends:
Pussy power
Mrs. Europe 2013(?)
In 2017-2020 she several times changed her mind whether she's not interested in beauty pageants or they are very good to meet strong, successful women. Same about talking to middle eastern strangers on facebook. But hey, who are we to judge. Let's concentrate on something we understand instead.
Education
Forbes
Tatsiana lies about her education. Both her Forbes page and LinkedIn have four rows: two bachelors, masters, and a "law degree". In reality, the first bachelor degree was not received as she dropped out. In addition, there are no separate "Law Degree" and Masters of Arts/Sciences" in TalTech - there is a "Masters of Arts in Law". So just two degrees, not four.
Why lie about your education in the world where you don't have to have many degrees to be successful? A bellwether of what to come.
Interviews
Interview to Ritossa's CEO Magazine
Besides sitting on a panel with Sir Anthony Ritossa, Markus Lehner, Queen Diambi and Prince Michel de Yougoslavie, she recorded an interview with the now infamous CEO Magazine. Ritossa, by the way, promises almost 4 million views according to the package leaflet, but the magazine’s channel has only 1600 subscribers. When we stumbled upon this video, it had about 1000 views, now it’s a little over 2000.
In this interview she makes a bizzare claim that at the moment “[we] are building the biggest facility for training computer vision and AI for indoor farming which is quite exciting and then obviously to make our products scalable to be able to decrease co2 emissions”. It is this claim, that simultaneously is technically incompetent and tries to push “sustainability” buttons, that made us look closer at her — including LinkedIn pages and the pitch book for her startup.
But that is by far not the best interview she had. This one takes the crown:
Interview to Textte Podcast
UPDATE Oct 24: The best proof of wrongdoing is when the subject removes the videos and photos. The original video (https://www.youtube.com/embed/tuabZyeWONw) has been removed 10 days after our publication, but we made a backup copy and the full transcript is also available. We meticulously archive every single piece of evidence.)
In November 2020 Tatsiana gave an interview to a channel with 13 subscribers, and you can often hear roosters outside (we hope). She makes several startling statements:
— You sold your first business at the age of 20. So we are really curious about your story that how this all started, like prior to LaavaTech?
— Um, so it wasn’t a technical company. Um I was basically doing licensing it was a licensing company and i established it in Belarus at a very young age. I had a partner she was, um, what is the legal term, uh, like the partner in a law firm and she was helping me with… At first, she helped me with like financing and she helped with the legal side of things and I’ve been doing all the hustle. So when I’ve been moving out of Belarus, uh, we decided that it would be wise to sell it.
She states that she sold her first business when she was 20, before moving to Estonia, which means it happened in 2013. What is wrong with this story? Yes, Tatsiana did work in a licensing company, Hyde & Associates OÜ, but it was in 2017–2018, when she was 25 or so. This is a bona fide Estonian company, established in 2003, when Zaretskaya was 8 years old. The company has had the same owner since then. In other words, Tatsiana’s story of founding a business and selling it at the age of 20 is a lie.
— What you were doing in between like you started a company at the age of 20 you sold it and then after that [until] LaavaTech?
— I’ve been just uh building like a legal career, I’ve always been like studying how to be a lawyer, international lawyer, um, IT law. I’ve been a scholar from UN and OCC, um, I’ve always been getting various awards, I have award from President of Republic of Belarus for my outstanding performances, so.
— So you started this company as a university project and then you took it professionally?
— Yeah, exactly, I’ve been working as a lawyer back then, um, and then I quit my job and got into startup world.
But it is another lie, very easy to catch. Tatsiana’s company was established in 2015, the same year she got her bachelor’s degree. Her “law career” (can you work as a lawyer after 4 years of education?) started two years later, in 2017. Between that, she did a stint in China as an exotic dancer and a model. By the way, Tatsiana claims five years of practicing law, whereas, in reality, it is just a bit over a year.
Interview to Zerkalo.io (Belarus)
There is one more interview, to a Belarusian news outlet posted after she started her political career (original article).
The piece refers to Tatsiana as “a millionaire from the Forbes list” and she states that “for a comfortable life, 150 thousand dollars a month is completely enough.” She is proud of having been “a speaker at the Ritossa Family Office global investment summit in Monaco”, and refers to it as an “event was organized by Prince Albert II of Monaco. As a rule, it gathers the richest and most influential people in the world.“, going even further than Ritossa.
By now you're seeing the familiar pattern of exaggeations and lies, but she still must have gotten money somewhere to pay Ritossa. Let’s take a closer look at Mrs. Zaretskaya’s startup, LaavaTech.
Technical
There is almost no information on her website as to how her solution actually works. The most information we got from the 2020 investor presentation:
I have three more co-founders on engineering side of things, with over 25 years of experience each in chemical and electrical engineering. Chemical engineering is extremely important for us because all the reactions that happen within the plant and in the farm are basically chemical reactions.
What makes us really unique is that we were able to get hold of photosynthetic process. We make light synchronized with the light and dark phases of the photosynthesis.
- Claims of the “revolutionary understanding of photosynthesis” are a fraud: scientific works on the effect of pulsating light on photosynthesis and crop yields have been published in peer-reviewed and scientific journals for the last 20 years examples). Zaretskaya’s promises are not just many times higher than the results of the studies of real scientists (88% of savings vs 10–15%). For the 88% savings, the duty cycle of a lamp has to be a little over 10%, this means that during every minute, the bulb would be turned on for just 7 seconds, regardless of frequency or spectrum. And, unlike Laava, not one of the real scientists dared to promise “improved color, proportions, taste and smell properties of plants compared to standard LED lighting.” Maybe just because there are real biologists and biochemists, and not, quoting Zaretskaya, “chemical engineers who came up with a chemical engineering solution for a biological problem”? It appears ours young scientist does not undersand the difference between chemical engineering and biochemistry...
- Tatsiana claims that the savings come from the fact that the “company can adjust lighting to the light and dark phases of photosynthesis”. It is a fallacy, however, since these phases occur simultaneously (for example, read here or here). The term “dark phase” does not mean that stage occurs in the dark, it just means that light is not required for this part of the photosynthesis cycle, and these stages are not temporally separated. So, the claims that “We make the light pulsate according to these phases, we know how to identify them” is a blatant pseudo-science.
- “Patented control unit” is also a lie. There is indeed a patent. Just not on the control unit. Polish patent PL435000A1 belongs to the Polish subsidiary of Zaretskaya (to which we will return), but it only concerns “providing the required amount of current supplied in a pulsed mode to a chain of LEDs” — the solution may not be bad, but the task is a standard electrical engineering task with many solutions, and this one does not give LaavaTech any strategic advantage.
- Other technical claims are also all over the place. For example, back in 2019 Laava claimed that the product is ready, and stressed LED effectiveness as the main competitive advantage: “One number you can use to understand this advantage is μmol/joule, which for us is up to 3.3, whereas for example Philips has been able to reach only 3.1 μmol/j”, but in 2020 presentation lamps have become unimportant: “and the third part is the lamp itself which is not really important”.
Organizational
Notably, not a single one of the company staff from the investor presentation shows their experience in LaavaTech on LinkedIn. And her other startup (Meliora) is comprised mostly of the same founders.
Bizarrely, she claims that her husband does not work with her, but Estonian register documents show that he is a cofounder in both of her companies, and he is prominently featured in the investor pitch materials as the Chief Marketing Officer no less.
Financial
Zaretskaya tries to forcefully project a feeling of success and wealth, like all scammers. For the same reason she also always mentions her expensive hobby of collecting meteorites.
In the interview we referred to above she menitioned a salary of $150,000 per month. According to her interview to Forbes Woman (translation, original), in September 2020, "the company revenue The company's turnover today is about $280,000 per month".
It is a lie: according to LaavaTech's official Income Statement from its 2020 Fiscal Year Report, its entire 2020 revenue is just ... €95,000 - not for a month, for the entire year! (and €81,000 for 2019):
In 2020, the company showed a paper profit of €22,000 on revenue of €95,000, and borrowed €54,915 just to stay afloat, despite grants. Source: LaavaTech's reporting data from the Estonia's offical register, https://ariregister.rik.ee/. The total salary of all employees (3 people) was €32,000 per year. Incidentally, the number of employees (3) differs from what the headcount provided to the prospective investors (14) in the contemporaneous (2020) investor materials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON3t23XmaEE, embedded above; in the interview she provides yet another headcount).
Moving forward, taxable turnover for the II quarter of 2022 is just €6549, approximately 2 thousand euros per month:
Taxable turnover is the revenue received from the customers — it does not include investments, loans and grants (in fact, a part of the turnover might not be from the real customers, but as paymemt for ficticious services provided to other affiliated companies to funnel their grant money to Zaretskaya’s main organization, see below).
Sounds hardly enough to pay the founder a salary of €150,000 per month as she stated in the Belarusian interview. Even €30,000 to pay Ritossa, sounds a bit too expensive. Where is the money coming from?
(In the same Forbes interview, she claims to receive a salary of just $565)
How it works
According to the same interview, in autumn on 2020 LaavaTech was in the process of concluding several strategic partnerships, which can bring it an additional 3-5 million annually. None of that materialized.
In fact, Zaretskaya’s startup only stays afloat using EU grants. It is operating like a Ponzi scheme — take financing, but don’t use it not for product development, instead - develop a personal brand using Forbes Council and other paid schemes to receive the next round of financing. It appears that participation in the Ritossa summit was exactly part of the strategy.
But the fee is steep. Where to get money to participate in such “conferences” in the first place?
In 2019 she opened a company (legally unrelated, just the same owner and name) in Poland. There was no business sense in opening yet another separate company in the EU, which is not evena a subsidiary of the main company. The Polish company was opened for the sole reason of applying for government assistance for small businesses: the application was made the same day the company was opened. And she received PLN 180 thousand to aid the polish company. She funneled the funds into her main company — as a service performed, to show revenue. After the polish company was drained, it was dissolved - again, there was no business sense to open it in the first place.
With this “revenue” to show, she applied for the next round of grants, this time from the EU. And she received it. In February 2021, Zaretskaya’s company received funding from the EU: 1.2 million out of €2.4 million under grant 967978. This is the only time her company had over one million. Apparently, it is this episode Zaretskaya spoke about when she answered the question “what did she feel when she earned her first million”. She does not even see the difference between a grant for product development, and her personal income.
Having received the financing, and instead of working, she paid some of this money to Ritossa for attending his "summit with royalty" to build her personal brand and prepare for the time when EU financing ends.
Then, she showed off the photos and interviews in the “CEO Magazine” to gullible journalists, and boasted of speaking at "an investment summit in Monaco with sheikhs and princes". Those jornalists ate the story without blinking.
Reporting
EU’s funding runs out in January 2023, the final report will be due at that time. But in February 2022 an interim report was required, and it was submitted:
There are three parts to LaavaTech’s report. The second part has to contain the actual results of spending over one million of the EU taxpayer money (compare to some other projects). How many words do you think it takes to describe what a million euro went into? 45:
“During the first 12 months of the FarMind project, we worked on the compatibility of our control unit with other systems on the market. We run continuous tests to train our AI and feed it as much data as possible along with our pilot data.”
That’s it. Gone is the “biggest facility to train computer vision”…
Everything else in the “report” is the text from their marketing materials from 2020 - before the grant was received about the “revolutionary understanding of photosynthesis” and “patented control unit”.
The verdict
So, over two million euros of the EU taxpayer money went to a fradulent “startup” that in turn paid that money to the next level of scammers a blatant self-promotion in an attempt to fleece new investors. The EU taxpayers indirectly sponsored a panel of Markus Lehner, "Sir" Anthony Ritossa, Francesco Lombardo, "Queen" Diambi, Tatsiana Zaretskaya, and "Prince Michel de Yougoslavie" :
And now, as the grant money soon runs out, it turns out that Mrs. Zaretskaya is not just an "entrepreneur", but has started a political career, as a minister for finance and economics in the shadow cabinet of ministers in Belarus. (another source)
Besides the obvious issue with a scammer's access to public finances, sow would she find time in her busy schedule for another full-time job, as just a week before she literally spent nights in the office and constantly traveled on business? Well, our guess is she would take a page from Markus Lehner’s playbook§.
Our verdict:
