Wikipedia article on Scytl contains the link, as footnote one, showing the acquisition of Scytl by the Russian company Paragon, or one of its subsidiaries... changing the ownership while still keeping it ostensibly a Spanish company.
“Service Point Solutions, part of Paragon Group, announces the acquisition of Scytl, the Barcelona based company leader in digital voting and electoral modernization”.
Scytl.com. 22 October 2020. “Service Point Solutions, a company quoted in the Spanish Stock Exchange and part of Paragon group, announced today the acquisition of Scytl, a Barcelona based company leader in digital voting and electoral modernization. The acquisition also includes Civiciti, the citizen participation platform launched by the software company in 2016, and Scytl subsidiaries in USA, Canada, Australia, France and Greece.”
“Citizen participation platform”... launched in 2016... leading them into $75 million Euro in debt they couldn’t repay... while their well heeled former VC funding sources largely abandoned prior support of them ?
I note, particularly, that there was a US company involved at one point: Sandton Capital “specializes providing solutions for situations that are too difficult for more traditional sources of capital to navigate.”
Sandton at 16 W 46th Street
https://www.propertyshark.com/mason/Property/20430/16-W-46-St-New-York-NY-10036/
Seems to me that someone at Sandton might be able to answer a few questions about what they saw as the risks when they were looking at Scytl as an investment potential ?
Also note, while their staff does seem it is inordinately large, it isn’t like Sandton is heavy hitter. They’ve apparently only made three other investments:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sandton-capital-partners/recent_investments
July 2020, £10M lead investor: Nextbase design and manufacture dash cameras.
West End, Hampshire, United Kingdom
March 2018, acquired: Aspin Group provides civil engineering products and services, with expertise in foundations and piling for rail, power networks, civils.
Hemel Hempstead, Hertford, United Kingdom
March 2015, acquired: Neoelectra is the independent operator in the CHP and Biomass field in Spain
Sant Just Desvern, Catalonia, Spain
Sandton’s website, interestingly, has a few language options on the upper right corner of the page: English, French, Spanish...
Their “team” page, usefully, shows vcard data if you hover over the pics... 212, 512, 919, 310 area codes plus country codes 33, 34, 44, 352:
Oddly, it also lets you sort by location... and doing that says there are seven people in the UK... even though the vcard data shows many of them in New York... and eight in Europe, again with many of those having New York phone numbers. Where are they, really ? It’s an oddity.
V-card data says the advisors numbers are in New York, Austin, TX, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC, LA as Beverly Hills, Malibu, Long Beach, CA plus France, Spain, a UK mobile, and Luxembourg.
The page also allows a sort of advisors by role... footnote at the page bottom usefully points out “who has the information” and who doesn’t... A sort for “operations”... and a familiar name or an interesting name or two might stand out.
Dimitri Korvyokov ? A Russian linkage ? A Paragon linkage ? I don’t know the guy, but, can ask... where else might one have seen that name before ? No telling, is the answer, because results of a web search are “no results for this search”... an highly improbable result that mostly occurs when someone is preventing search results being reported. Otherwise you’d tend to get a mass of irrelevant results with similar names (how uncommon would a name have to be to return exactly nothing ?) or others with the same or similar name, just the first, just the last, etc., rather than exactly “nothing”... making that one obvious tell in the “fix” masking web search utility that the AI for now seems incapable of handling plausibly.
Steven Botnick, who seems to be the principle, apparently is the same as the NY realtor ? If only we knew someone with roots in New York real estate ?
Wikipedia page for Paragon is a bit more sparse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragon_Software_Group
Interestingly, a web search for “Service Point Solutions” also returns exactly NOTHING ?
Must be hard to succeed in business when the web doesn’t allow people to find you ? How does that work ?
https://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2020/11/larry-johnson-on-scytl-raid.html#more
Crack on... Kraken... whatever...