St. Phatty
Active member
GQ Article on "Utility Patents" & Monsanto-ization of Cannabis Industry.
Good article at GQ.
https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-pot-monopoly-mystery
May "Biotech Institute" and anybody else who tries to take over OUR industry ... experience 1 Million+ Roadblocks - on a good day (for them.)
Something is crawling under the carpet.
"I also discovered that, in the back of Backes’s 2014 book, Cannabis Pharmacy, one of the first people he thanked was “Shawn for his peerless vision.” A source familiar with Backes’s work independently mentioned that his research was being bankrolled by a Middle Eastern man who ran a cosmetics-packaging company. And Fred Gardner, editor of the medical-marijuana journal O’Shaughnessy’s, said that one of the other inventors on BioTech Institute’s patents had introduced him to an Iranian man named Shawn at a cannabis festival in 2014 or 2015.
“I could tell from how they were talking, like, ‘Oh, Shawn is here.’ Like Bob Dylan had walked into the room.” Gardner recalled. “I was definitely left with the impression that he was the decision maker in their business.”
But was Sedaghat really a billionaire? In an unsuccessful 2011 Abatin application to open a dispensary in New Jersey, a letter from a bank read: “Shawn Sedaghat and affiliates maintain balances in the high eight figures”—that is, nearly $100 million.
I soon learned that Sedaghat’s current cosmetics-packaging concern, Yonwoo/PKG, has an office in the same skyscraper as Phytecs and BioTech Institute. Yonwoo/PKG is in suite 2240. Suite 2250 belongs to Gary Hiller, the lawyer who runs Phytecs and BioTech Institute.
Each time I went there, I was told that Hiller and Sedaghat were out of town. Once, a well-known marijuana activist named Don Duncan answered the door to Hiller’s suite and said he worked for BHC Consultants. Who wasn’t part of this murky network of companies? I wondered. Duncan referred to the two suites as “separate businesses but all the same family.” (He later denied knowledge of Sedaghat’s involvement.)
It was certainly starting to look like Hiller and Sedaghat were behind a stealthy conglomerate. I later found at least seven businesses with both Hiller’s and Sedaghat’s names or addresses attached, six of which have filed renewal forms in the past two years. And a cannabis researcher who was approached about a job by someone involved with BioTech Institute told me, “One hundred percent, this is a single group of people working together under several names.”
Hiller said that Sedaghat was not the primary investor behind BioTech Institute and that BioTech Institute and Phytecs and NaPro and BHC “do not have a relationship, other than the fact that I am involved with each of these companies,” although “individuals from some of these companies have collaborated with one another from time to time.”
Sedaghat’s attorney confirmed that he is an investor in Phytecs and “is an investor and has business relationships with a number of non-cannabis-based, multi-national public companies that may have had, or currently have, some involvement with securing intellectual property related to cannabis.” However, other than that, Sedaghat has not “been an investor in, or in any sense been professionally affiliated with, any cannabis-related business” since 2015."
Good article at GQ.
https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-pot-monopoly-mystery
May "Biotech Institute" and anybody else who tries to take over OUR industry ... experience 1 Million+ Roadblocks - on a good day (for them.)
Something is crawling under the carpet.
"I also discovered that, in the back of Backes’s 2014 book, Cannabis Pharmacy, one of the first people he thanked was “Shawn for his peerless vision.” A source familiar with Backes’s work independently mentioned that his research was being bankrolled by a Middle Eastern man who ran a cosmetics-packaging company. And Fred Gardner, editor of the medical-marijuana journal O’Shaughnessy’s, said that one of the other inventors on BioTech Institute’s patents had introduced him to an Iranian man named Shawn at a cannabis festival in 2014 or 2015.
“I could tell from how they were talking, like, ‘Oh, Shawn is here.’ Like Bob Dylan had walked into the room.” Gardner recalled. “I was definitely left with the impression that he was the decision maker in their business.”
But was Sedaghat really a billionaire? In an unsuccessful 2011 Abatin application to open a dispensary in New Jersey, a letter from a bank read: “Shawn Sedaghat and affiliates maintain balances in the high eight figures”—that is, nearly $100 million.
I soon learned that Sedaghat’s current cosmetics-packaging concern, Yonwoo/PKG, has an office in the same skyscraper as Phytecs and BioTech Institute. Yonwoo/PKG is in suite 2240. Suite 2250 belongs to Gary Hiller, the lawyer who runs Phytecs and BioTech Institute.
Each time I went there, I was told that Hiller and Sedaghat were out of town. Once, a well-known marijuana activist named Don Duncan answered the door to Hiller’s suite and said he worked for BHC Consultants. Who wasn’t part of this murky network of companies? I wondered. Duncan referred to the two suites as “separate businesses but all the same family.” (He later denied knowledge of Sedaghat’s involvement.)
It was certainly starting to look like Hiller and Sedaghat were behind a stealthy conglomerate. I later found at least seven businesses with both Hiller’s and Sedaghat’s names or addresses attached, six of which have filed renewal forms in the past two years. And a cannabis researcher who was approached about a job by someone involved with BioTech Institute told me, “One hundred percent, this is a single group of people working together under several names.”
Hiller said that Sedaghat was not the primary investor behind BioTech Institute and that BioTech Institute and Phytecs and NaPro and BHC “do not have a relationship, other than the fact that I am involved with each of these companies,” although “individuals from some of these companies have collaborated with one another from time to time.”
Sedaghat’s attorney confirmed that he is an investor in Phytecs and “is an investor and has business relationships with a number of non-cannabis-based, multi-national public companies that may have had, or currently have, some involvement with securing intellectual property related to cannabis.” However, other than that, Sedaghat has not “been an investor in, or in any sense been professionally affiliated with, any cannabis-related business” since 2015."
