Bad Magic | The Lawsuit | S4-E6

Things were not going well for Serhat Kim Ruktu in the summer of 2023. The man who carried out the abduction and execution of Gregory Davis had pleaded guilty and a plot that law enforcement said Serhat had masterminded. And the biotech company Serhat helped found, anokian biosciences. The one that prosecutors claim was part of his motivation for the hit was failing.

The company, once valued at over half a billion dollars, was hemorrhaging money.

They desperately needed to make a change. That's one of the co-founders of Anokian, Renee Sindliv, and the CEO, Mark Dival, began a series of conversations with a health startup that they believed could brighten their prospects. The company was called Jedi Cube, and it was valued at over $200 million, despite the fact that it had generated no revenue.

The two companies began the process of merging, and in August, Anokian changed its name to Renavaro biosciences. The plan seemed to work, immediately their stock went up. There was just one problem. Serhat's husband, William Anderson Whitichand, decided to throw a massive wrench into the

gears. In January, he found a lawsuit filled with explosive allegations about how Anokian was operating behind the scenes. If it succeeds, it could take down the board of directors, but it also seems to threaten the entire company.

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In Serhat's husband, filed his lawsuit, one of the people watching was Nate Anderson. Nate and his team at Hindenburg Research are responsible for the financial fraud investigation that exposed Serhat's true origins. Today, he's going to talk us through the latest chapter in the Anokian story, an insider alleging insider trading, boardroom backstabbing, and major cover-ups.

Nate, first off, thanks for being here and talking with us about this suit.

“Can you start off by just briefly describing it for me?”

Yeah. The lawsuit is filed by Serhat's husband and an entity that he has a stake in that owns a lot of shares of what one's was called Anokian by our science. So, it's a lawsuit where they are accusing the company of fraud, accusing the company failing to disclose key information to investors, and demanding that Renee, sin love, the

chairman, Mark Diable, the CEO, and other insider's give money back to the company that the lawsuit alleges was unjustly stolen essentially. And this basically, to me, reads like a spite lawsuit. In my view, it's 108 pages of Serhat through his husband saying, "You sued me last year, calling me a phrase and fraud."

Like, why don't you guys take a look at yourselves? It's just, I looked at it and there's just such irony. I mean, he's accusing the other side of fraud.

I just, when I first heard about this, I was like, "It's what?"

Yeah. No, I mean, what was your reaction? What was your reaction?

“I think Serhat is sitting in prison waiting for his trial for wire fraud now in the murder”

conspiracy, and I think he's probably pretty pissed that the company sued him and essentially tried to blame everything on him. So I think he's just trying to say, "No, you guys are also scumbags, and a lot of this is your fault, and you're there, and you're involved, and here's a bunch of evidence showing how you guys were enriching yourselves at the expense of shareholders, and sort of harnessing

lies and his own claims to make money for themselves."

I think the company is endangered by the prospect that the major merger announcement is not likelyhood completely worthless that they have virtually nothing left. So I think the company is in danger.

“The lawsuit, I think, helps bring that closer to fruition, but I think that's likely an”

inevitability at this point. So if they still own a big share of the stock, why would they do something that would hurt the company because if the stock goes up, then presumably they make money? So I'm confused by this. Can you explain it to me?

Yeah, I think part of it is a allegation that the insiders were buying shares at a massive discount ahead of major news that they knew was going to send the stock up. So there was one example where Renee Sinlev, the chairman of the company, bought stock, just days before the company announced a major merger transaction with a AI company, and that transaction announcement sent the stock up over a thousand percent over the course

of months from its low prices. So with the chairman buying shares immediately prior to the transaction with clear knowledge

that was going to be announced, the allegation is that he basically enriched himself at

the company's expense using this material non-public information that he had. That's a pretty serious allegation.

“But wouldn't Serhat and his husband have also made money off the stock?”

Like if the whole company emplodes, then nobody wins, right? That's right. Yeah, so I do think to an extent this is probably cutting his nose off to spider's face. So you mentioned Mark Dival and his name comes up over and over again in the suit. We covered this some in the podcast, but at first he's a big defender of Serhat and

then it ends up there swimming each other. Can you kind of walk me through just briefly the arc of their relationship?

Yeah, so at first Mark Dival and the company for that matter had just lavished praise on

Serhat that he was going to revolutionize medicine that he was the Michelangelo of biotech and things of that sort. And for years had just been lavishing this praise on him, but then when everything came crumbling

“down, I think they chose to try and pin the blame on Serhat.”

Serhat is in jail and I think the lawsuit that they filed, this was in October 2022, seemed like an effort to alleged that Serhat was the prison fraud that he had faked all the data. He was responsible for all these terrible things that had happened. It doesn't seem unreasonable knowing what we know now. No, I think it's probably the case.

I think Serhat is indeed a prison fraud, but that doesn't mean Mark Dival and Renaissance in love, aren't. In a lot of white-collar cases, the defense for everyone else who's not the kind of key individual

is almost always the play dumb defense.

Now we didn't know that data was all fake. We didn't know our key shareholder in co-founder was a psycho murder magician out there, like casting spells or whatever and giving quack remedies to terminal cancer patients. I genuinely don't know what the justification they landed on for all this was, but I think the game is they are pretending more or less to be stone-cold more on about everything

that just had no idea what was going on and I think Serhat recognized that through the lawsuit. It's like, okay, these guys are trying to pin it all on me and it wasn't all on me either either alleging that they knew or that they themselves were engaged in some sketchy practices that resulted in where the company is today.

So it centers around the acquisition of this company, can you just briefly walk me through how they acquire that company and what the lawsuit is saying about the problems in the acquisition of the company? Oh my gosh, yeah, all right, let me give it a shot at least the, so around mid 2023, a no-key in biosciences was in pretty dire straits, almost out of cash, had a world of liabilities,

it was really close to being just an insolvent shell with tons of legal liabilities through the revelations around Serhat, the faking of the scientific data and a lot of just misstatements

So company was in, in pretty dark times and around middle of 2023, the chairman, Renace

and love, began talks to merge with a company called Jedi Cube or Gettie Cube, whatever however it's for now and the company from what we can tell didn't actually exist until it was formed in June and all they had around that time was an agreement to merge or acquire with a tiny little startup that had what they claim to be some AI technology. And from what we can tell that tiny little startup itself was almost insolvent, so it didn't

seem like it was a match made in heaven, but this Jedi Cube acquired this small startup. And then the deal was for Jedi Cube to merge with anokin and rebrand and renew itself as a totally new AI med tech like hot company. And that is exactly what happened. The stock went up, changed its name to Renavaro biosciences, a bunch of people bought it,

“anything that can hype up this new pivot to AI and get investors excited, I think is what”

they were gravitating to. And I know you're not an attorney, but you spend a lot of time looking at dirt on companies. I'd like your kind of general impression about whether this seems like a strong case or not. As much as I feel weird agreeing with Sir Hot on something, I think the evidence here

seems quite strong and well documented, I think there's quite a bit here. So are you going to keep on? I'm curious, are you done? Are you going to keep on pop and popcorn and following this? Are you just an observer now? No, we're going to follow the story. I want to see what happens with Sir Hot's trial. He is a pretty talented magician and illusionist, like can he fool a jury? I'm curious

to see what happens with Mark Dibel and Renaison love, like two individuals that despite everything have come out thus far, relatively unscathed and have just slapped a new name on what they're doing and tried to do it all over again in not much more convincing and fashion than the last time they tried this. I think that's a good place to end. Thanks Nate. It was nice to talk to you.

You too. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks to ADT, our presenting sponsor.

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heard of only fans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism, a silent judgment you

might say. Who is actually using this platform? I am. Hi, I'm only fans creator and comedian, Gracie Cainin. You're from home? No, I'm only fans. And, and he's doing all the chances, yeah, after spending. My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started an only fans account. I'm not a sister, just to clarify. It turns out, a lot of what I thought I knew about only fans was wrong. I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for

“something that wasn't real. What happens when connection comes with a price tag?”

Listen to only fantasy wherever you get your podcasts, or binge all episodes of only fantasy,

ad-free, right now, only unaudible. Start your audible subscription in the audible app, or on Apple podcasts. After Hindenburg research exposed that Anokin's scientific founder had faked all of his credentials, the company stood by the science. But in 2022, they dialed that back. Five months, after Serhat's arrest, they admitted that he had actually faked some of the scientific data

in his papers. Elizabeth Bick is a scientific fraud researcher, and she was one of the earliest people to notice the inconsistencies in Serhat's research. She's here to talk about how those

papers got published in the first place, and how scientific fraud can slip under the radar.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for talking with me. I have to say I'm a fan. I'm very familiar with the work that you do, so I'm really happy to talk to you. When I first started out in science writing, I was a little more naive. I had this view of the peer review system as being the failsafe against any of this happening. That, of course, when scientific papers are read by other people in the field, their job is to make sure that

the science is sound and keep this kind of thing from happening. What's the reality of that? Oh, yeah. It's a tough question to answer, because some of the things I'm finding you wish that a peer reviewer would have seen that, and because sometimes it's so obvious, such the

“photoshopping is so obvious that somebody should have caught that. But the truth is that peer”

reviewers are, well, it's a volunteer job. People peer reviewing typically will do this on a Friday evening, and when the rest of the family is doing some fun, something fun, they're still peer reviewing. And so scientists are doing this unpaid as a volunteer job, and they're not really educated on catching fraud. That's not really the purpose of peer review. It is, it's the science good. And if you assume that data is real, if you just trust that blindly, then that is a very

different way of looking at the data than if you put the different hats on and think could this be fraud. And so that is how I approach some of the papers. So similarly, I feel that the fraud detection, looking for specific problems with papers should be done by paid persons who work at publishers or journals. Yeah, and speaking about the larger scientific community, I don't want anyone hearing this to think that this is rampant, that most of scientific research out there is fake

or fraud. So can you give me some context in terms of the percentage of papers that you review that actually do have problems? So I did a scan of 20,000 papers, and I found that around 2% of those papers had really big problems that were not the result of an honest error, but were the result of an intention to mislead. And so that's 2% and those were obvious problems by looking at the papers. So the real percentage of fraud has to be a bit higher, but I would estimate that maybe

in the 5% range. So what's the answer then to keeping the fraudsters out of science? Do we need

idea of having a whole fraud department at a journal, but again, I don't know if that's feasible,

“but if you had a magic wand, how would you fix this? We would hope to have more consequences”

for people who are caught doing fraud, but the problem is now we also have these professional

scammers, which we call paper mills, which are networks of people making money selling completely fake papers to authors who need to publish a paper, and you can find these advertisements very openly, for example, on Facebook groups, and there's a whole network of people where they advertise, do you need an authorship on a paper and give us some money? Wow, give you a paper. And there's hundreds and hundreds of advertisements, probably even thousands

and how much does it cost? If I'm desperate and I got to publish a paper, I'm going to sell out for a fake scientific paper. Well, do you want to be a first author, second author, a third author,

because you know, first author. So they're tears of their tears. They're tears, yes.

It depends, like I've seen $5,000, I've also seen $500, I guess it depends on the quality of the paper, but a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousand dollars, yes. But even then, this paper has to get past peer review. Yeah, but it gets like these paper mills seem to target specific journals. And again, this is very similar to a credit card fraud, where the first try one dollar, oh, okay, that worked. Okay, let's now do a bigger amount. And so they try first one paper, and if that

gets accepted, then they will target that specific journal and send in more. And it seems that some journals are even in the loop and are willing to accept these papers. So it's low quality journals that accept this in general, and they will look the other way. It may be even get kicked back from the paper mills, where the editor might get some money if they accept the papers. Wow. So I want to move to the particular situation that we talked about in this particular season of

Dr. Death. I don't think Sarah had like went out and bought a paper, but if you could, I would like to talk about the fraud and the retraction of papers in this particular instance. This was not the

first that you'd heard about Nokia and Sarah, tell me how you first heard about this particular

“situation. I think I was contacted by a journalist asking me if I heard the story about the founder”

and they asked me if I had heard about it and if I could look into their papers. And so there's two posters by Nokia and BioSciences. Scientific posters presented at two different conferences, and these posters are sort of like science posters at a high school science fair and they're about two different topics. In one, they use their magic technique to cure mice of hepatitis B infection, and in the second poster they use their magic technique to cure mice of COVID-19 infection.

And so these are very different experiments and yet one of the mouse is exactly the same photo on both posters. And so there's another problem in some of the papers that Sarah has published. He doesn't disclose his conflict of interest. So as a scientist, when you write a scientific paper and you're funded by a particular interest group or maybe you work for a company, there's a financial advantage that you might have publishing. He works and he has founded in Nokia and BioSciences.

And there's another co-author who works at UCLA who also is listed and both of them have patents that are very relevant to the topic of these papers, but they don't disclose them. And so he either forgot to include that statement, which is very unlikely because the journal will ask you what is your conflict of statement and he actually said. No, there's no conflict of interest. And that seemed to be not completely true. Yeah, you think that would be something he wouldn't

“forget. Do you have any thoughts about the actual cure strategies that he talks about?”

And so there's another problem in some of the papers in which he describes this therapy to to treat patients who have some viral infection with another virus and I think it's to distract the immune system. So in this this paper, they described this technique and they described two different patients who were magically cured with this super-infection strategy. So one is a COVID-19 patient who was treated with this super-infection six days after their COVID-19

patient symptoms started. And then he got better. But I don't know, I've had COVID twice actually.

within a week. So he started on day six and he got better. Well, you know, he could have used

chocolate pudding and he would have gotten better. Like that is that seems to be not a very convincing evidence that the strategy of the super-infection works. Yes. Well, based on what you saw, do you think he just made some mistakes and the

“science is real? Or do you think the whole thing is just made up?”

I'm not sure if the science of inoculum biosciences is real or not. Based on what I see of lack of disclosure of conflict of interest, a reused image of a mouse, some other posters that appear

to have reused images that have passed on for different experiments, I'm very skeptical.

But I think a lot of people want to believe in some magic cure for all kinds of diseases. Why do you think that is? If you have a patient who has some severe disease, maybe cancer, or severe infection, they will try whatever is offered to them. In the hopes, it will cure them. We all would be. If we were in that situation, you would just grab any chance that people offer to you because as humans we want to believe in these success stories. And that is the reason

by a lot of people who are perhaps charming, who have the rights attitude to convince other people,

they can pull that off. Yeah, that's kind of a universal quality to the doctors that we've covered

in this series. And even other doctors I've written about who take advantage of people. And they seem to have a lot of bedside manner and charm. And sadly, in so many cases, the patients are facing death or serious health consequences. And then these men step in with promises to save them. And it's also such an easy choice in a way to to experience some people who are going to die

“anyways because if the treatment didn't work, they're not going to complain, right?”

Well, I just want to thank you for the work that you do to try to hold to account people who take advantage of the system. And I also want to thank you for spending time talking with us. Yeah, you're very welcome. It was my pleasure to be here and to be talking about this topic. Listen to Dr. Death, the Cowboy, on the audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Dr. Death, the Cowboy, early and ad-free right now.

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From Wendry, this is a special episode of Dr. Death, Bad Magic. I'm your host, Laura Beal. Producer is Nika Singh. Senior producer is Russell Finch. Senior editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Fact checking by Jacqueline Coletti. Sound designed and mixing by Jay Rothman.

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