Aphria Inc (fka APHA)

[CornellEngineer]

I've been deepdiving into this DeFrancesco dude ever since the short report hit last week. What I'm really starting to think is that when he started Aphria he fully intended it to be just another scam company just like all his others have been...do an RTO (reverse takeover or reverse merger that avoids the scrutiny of a normal IPO) using a shell company that has nothing whatsoever to do with the new company being created, build up some shareholder capital and then start sucking it out leaving them high and dry. He did it with his sham energy companies and he did it with his sham mining companies...interestingly all focused on Colombia...he sure does like that country for some reason. And in between his energy/mining scams circa 2010 and his intended marijuana scams starting with Aphria followed up by RTOs that created Liberty & Scythian/SOL he occupied himself by ripping off investors with his good and equally crooked Honig buddy in other endeavors.

But a funny thing happened before he could pull his standard Dracula MO...Aphria grew and grew and all of a sudden DeFCon 1 found himself sitting on a gold mine with a market cap of billions of bucks...oh yeah, Andy sure hit the jackpot on this one. Not sure why this happened...maybe Neufeld didn't know Aphria was never intended to be a legit company in the first place and he really is a good and honest CEO who tried to build something real and tangible. Or more likely it was plain dumb blind luck going public at just the right time when investors/speculators had started throwing their money around willy-nilly at every fledgling pot startup reminiscent of the dot-com boom days of the 90s that a lot of my work buddies lost a lot of money on.

All I know is what I've seen over and over and over again...every single company this DeFCon 1 dude ever founded or was heavily involved with one way or another has price charts that eventually end up looking like trainwrecks as they asymptotically approach zero.

I don't know if Neufeld is just as crooked and corrupt or is simply a naive CEO who got taken in or was blackmailed into shoveling DeFCon 1 tons of investor money under the table but either way this probably ain't gonna end well. It never has yet for anybody who's trusted DeFrancesco to be an honest capitalist and bet a few bucks on him...at least those who didn't get out in time before the crap hit the fan.

There's always the chance that this "analysis" of mine it totally FOS and Vic & Gang still have time to save this badly-listing if not sinking ship but they're rapidly running out of it. It may be that Aphria's only hope now for survival is to totally clean house of all the termites and hope that "this rot runs deep" that QCM spoke of is not yet so deep that the entire house has to be condemned and torn down.

I always figured something like this would eventually happen in this Wild Wild West environment that is the burgeoning marijuana industry with so much money being hurled around but you don't usually figure it will happen to the 3rd largest cannabis company in the entire sector. Sometimes bigger ain't always better. I found that out firsthand the hard way with a company called WorldCom.