Trump business interests Alt5 Sigma, the WLFI treasury company established by Eric Trump and several other World Liberty Financial executives, seems to be in crisis. In August, World Liberty Financial announced that it would create a WLFI treasury company using the Nasdaq-listed fintech firm, Alt5 Sigma [I90]. Eric Trump and fellow World Liberty executives Zach Witkoff and Zak Folkman were slated to join Alt5 Sigma’s board, although the Nasdaq later prohibited Eric Trump from joining the board due to the blatant conflict of interest, relegating him to “board observer” [I92]. According to an SEC filing,31 on August 27 — only two weeks after Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Witkoff, and Folkman rang the Nasdaq opening bell to celebrate the deal — the Alt5 board learned that the company and its former president and CEO André Beauchesne had been found criminally liable for money laundering in Rwanda in May and ordered to surrender $3.5 million. The filing claims that the existence of the Rwandan court decision “and other matters” had not previously been disclosed to the board, and were unknown at the time of the World Liberty Financial deal. Two former employees said that World Liberty had been provided with details of the Rwandan court proceedings, though a World Liberty Financial spokesperson refutes this.32

Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Zach Witkoff, and Zak Folkman, and others ring the Nasdaq opening bell on August 13

Then, on August 29, Alt5 Sigma employees received a letter from the law firm Thompson Hine warning that “litigation, regulatory investigations and other proceedings are reasonably anticipated” and that they had established a special committee to independently scrutinize Alt5’s financial records. It’s not clear if this was related to the Rwandan criminal case or some other matter. On September 4, Alt5 told employees it had suspended CEO Peter Tassiopoulos and its chief revenue officer pending the outcome of the Thompson Hine investigation, though an October SEC filing claims Tassiopoulos wasn’t suspended until October 16.33 In a November 21 SEC filing, Alt5 Sigma disclosed that Tassiopoulos’ replacement, the company’s CFO Jonathan Hugh, had been removed as both acting CEO and CFO “without cause”. The same filing also announced that the Chief Operating Officer had also been removed, and that a board member had decided to resign, with the latter citing “personal reasons”.34 On December 15, Tassiopoulos formally resigned as CEO and from the board.35