As Russian shells fell on civilians in Kyiv and Kharkiv on 24 February, a Twitter user started a rumor that Curaleaf – the largest cannabis company in the world, worth $4.22bn and with operations in 23 US states and several countries – was about to be sanctioned since its chairman and top investor had both made fortunes in Putin’s Russia. It wasn’t true. Neither man nor Curaleaf have been sanctioned, and all have stridently denied any current or ongoing association with the Russian state. However, there is an undeniable connection with the country. Boris Jordan, the company’s American-born chairman, spent most of two decades in Russia beginning in the early 1990s, where he earned a reputation as the country’s most prominent foreign investment banker – and, by his own admission, he “once had a close relationship with Putin”, who assumed the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin on 31 December 1999. That went sour, after the 2004 election, but Jordan maintained a presence in Russia, running an investment house and chairing an insurance company partially backed by the now sanctioned tycoon Roman Abramovich. Jordan took the insurance company public last year. A customer in an electronics store watches the then NTV head, Boris Jordan, hold a press conference in 2001. Photograph: Wojtek Laski/Getty Images Andrey Blokh, a Moscow-based dual citizen and longtime associate of Roman Abramovich, is Curaleaf’s second-biggest shareholder, according to publicly available disclosure filings. (At the peak of Curaleaf’s stock price, its holdings made the men paper billionaires. Even after shares in the company tumbled more than 60%, between February 2021 and the present, Jordan’s Curaleaf holdings are still worth $900m and Blokh’s $760m.) Before forming companies in 2014 that entered the cannabis industry in Las Vegas – firms that Curaleaf acquired in 2017 – Blokh was associated with Abramovich in several deals, including the 1998 purchase of Sibneft, a major oil company. Abramovich later admitted that the auction for Sibneft was rigged. There’s no suggestion that Blokh was so implicated. With licenses throughout the country, Curaleaf is positioned to eat a lion’s share of the US cannabis market, estimated to grow to $75bn by 2030. Yet the sources of its capital have not been closely scrutinized.

‘Oligarchic capital’

According to Louise Shelley, the founder and executive director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center and an expert in the flow of capital in and from Russia, there is reason to look closely at any business with historical financial links with Russian money. Speaking generally, Shelley, a professor at George Mason University in Washington DC, said: “Nobody has made money in Russia without, at the minimum, an accord or an accommodation with the Kremlin.”. The political realities in Russia qualify fortunes acquired and maintained since Putin’s ascent to power as what Shelley calls “oligarchic capital”. This is cash that flows from Russia with government approval – and, in some cases, a government cut – to western banks and investment vehicles based in countries with rule of law. While western firms doing business in Russia – and public spectacles such as the seizure of sanctioned oligarchs’ luxury yachts – have captured public attention, Shelley says, the historical movement of oligarchic capital into the US, UK and other western democracies has received less scrutiny. Customers wait in line at Curaleaf as New Jersey launches recreational cannabis sales in April. Photograph: Hannah Beier/ReutersCustomers at the Curaleaf dispensary in Bellmawr, New Jersey. Photograph: Joseph Kaczmarek/REX/Shutterstock This is a criticism that can be applied to Curaleaf as much as to any number of other US and international businesses. Other experts on Russia and kleptocracy take a softer line than Shelley. “I find it difficult to go after people like [Jordan],” said Anders Åslund, an economist, former adviser to Boris Yeltsin and the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, and author of the book Russia’s Crony Capitalism: From Market Economy to Kleptocracy. While Jordan earned himself a reputation as “the ugly face of western capitalism in Russia in the 1990s” and was certainly politically active in Putin’s first term – “What he did for Putin with [the television station] NTV in 2000 and 2001 was ugly,” Åslund said – Jordan has since kept a lower profile, staying out of politics and away from sensitive industries such as oil and gas, precious metals, and defense. And though richer or more prominent tycoons might have been more likely to be influenced by the government in some way, Jordan’s fortune may have been just small enough to stay under the Kremlin’s radar, Åslund added.

Jordan’s wealth

According to Forbes, Jordan is a “self-made” billionaire who “cut his teeth in investing” in Moscow in the 1990s. Blokh, whose wealth Forbes estimated at $1.9bn in 2021, dropped off the billionaires’ list this year, but the magazine described his fortune as also “self made”, noting his tenure as president of Sibneft – a major oil company that Abramovich resold to the Russian government in 2005 for more than 50 times its 1995 sale price – and his role in consolidating Russia’s dairy industry under the brand Unimilk, which was then sold to the French conglomerate Danone in 2010. Though Forbes does not identify sources of wealth for the two men beyond their Russian business interests and their more recent cannabis ventures, Victoria McEvedy, Jordan’s London attorney, identified “substantial business interests outside Russia”, including the consolidation of Telecity, a European data center, and energy companies active in the Bakken oil fields in Canada. “Together, US, Canadian and European assets represent more than 80% of Mr Jordan’s current portfolio,” McEvedy asserted. Shelley does not have any privileged or insider information about Jordan, Blokh, or Curaleaf in this context. Rather, she says, her critique applies to a general pattern, and she stresses that public awareness of the broader phenomenon as well as examination of various deal-flows are both in the public interest. Jordan and Curaleaf declined to be interviewed for this article. In a written response to questions sent to Curaleaf, McEvedy dismissed scrutiny of Jordan’s CV as “a broad fishing expedition”. “Boris Jordan is a native-born American of Russian and Ukrainian ancestry with business interests in the United States, Europe and Russia,” a statement McEvedy provided read in part. “His sole business interest in Russia is a minority stake in the shares of a retail insurance company that serves middle-class customers. THC products at Curaleaf’s Bellmawr location. Photograph: Hannah Beier/Reuters “As a foreign investor and an American, he is not and has not been affiliated with the government,” the statement added, noting that Jordan had last lived in Russia in 2003 and had not been there since January 2022. “We call for responsibility and facts instead of speculation and innuendo,” McEvedy’s statement continued. “Attempts to associate us with the Russian government or its policies will be vigorously resisted. “As attempts to exploit the current outrage against those policies for competitive and personal advantage, this is a dangerous path for all and unfairly discriminates against Americans of Russian heritage.” Jordan told Barron’s in 2018 that he “split time” between Moscow and Miami Beach, where he had offloaded a $26m penthouse condo that year. (At the time, Forbes referred to him as a “Russian venture capitalist”.) And though he resigned as chairman of the Moscow-based Renaissance Insurance in March, he retains a 35% stake in the company. His lawyer says this company has no government contracts or commercial clients. Jordan also chaired an investment group called Sputnik, which erased its website after the invasion. The site currently consists of a landing page that says “We’ll be back soon! Sorry for the inconvenience but we’re performing some maintenance at the moment.” Attempts were made to contact Blokh including the sending of registered letters to his addresses in Moscow via Kazakhstan, since no mail services from the US or UK are delivering mail to Russia. No responses were received.

Response to war

Curaleaf’s Russian connections are not new, as McEvedy’s defense pointed out. In 2018, Barron’s published a story titled “One of America’s richest marijuana companies has deep Russian roots”. Yet Curaleaf and Jordan seem aware they’re in a delicate position. Immediately after the invasion – but in the middle of a slide in the company’s stock prices that had begun a week prior – Curaleaf launched a defensive public-relations push. Framed as a response to the untruthful social-media rumors that the company was going to be sanctioned, critics say these defenses contained crucial tells. In a press release issued a day after the invasion began, Curaleaf described Russia’s war of choice as the “Russia-Ukraine crisis”. Later, Jordan was interviewed for an uncritical 3 March Forbes article – titled, “No, the world’s biggest cannabis company is not Russian owned” – in which he described himself and Blokh, who lives in Moscow, according to business records in Ohio and Nevada, as “American patriots, who are very, very pro-American” and the war as a “catastrophe” and “disaster”. However, he has been criticized for failing to condemn Putin or the Kremlin explicitly as the aggressor in these press statements and on his…