Nutritional Holdings, which is fundraising for its new cannabis business, has promised investors a 12,340% return over 10 years from their new cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies are unregulated digital tokens that are not managed by central banks.
Nutritional Holdings, whose stock is worth 1c, sells maize-based food and has lost money for six consecutive years. It is now growing cannabis in Lesotho to turn a profit.
It is trying to raise money by selling SA’s first cannabis cryptocurrency. It wrote to shareholders in March advertising its coin sale.
The shareholder letter is at times confusing, written in multiple fonts, littered with grammatical errors and suggests that R20,000 worth of digital coins will be worth R2.4m by 2030.
With a random sprinkling of capital letters and missing punctuation, Nutritional Holdings promises shareholders “first locally backed with underlying blue-chip assets”, “Only cryptocurrency to have dual income stream”, and “triple digit growth year on year”.
Apart from not using an online grammar checker, the company does not provide evidence that a digital currency has been created.
The technical white paper, a document that would detail the new cryptocurrency, how it works and was designed, opens to a blank page on the Cannacrypt website.
Nutritional Holdings uses the fact that it is listed to advertise its cryptocurrency.
“Build your cryptocurrency portfolio by investing in SA’s fastest growing JSE listed CBD product supplier,” the document reads.
In April, Nutritional Holdings distanced itself from the cryptocurrency and said money raised is in a private bank account linked to a company director’s new firm, Cannacrypt.
Perhaps regulators had been working behind the scenes, but it is peculiar that a listed company can behave like this with not a word said publicly by the financial authorities or the JSE.
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