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A bankruptcy trustee is alleging a DFW home flipper perpetrated a Ponzi scheme — with the participation or knowledge of the former regional executive vice president of Valliance Bank — that saw the bank paid back in full but defrauded investors out of at least $3 million, the Dallas Business Journal reported. In the litigation that’s ongoing in bankruptcy court in Phoenix, Arizona, trustee James Cross has set his sights on the bank itself and its former chief lending officer and executive vice president for Texas, Shelby Bruhn, in trying to recoup funds for the investors allegedly duped by Skyler Aaron Cook. The bank and Bruhn have denied the allegations and moved to dismiss them, a request U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Eddward Ballinger Jr. denied. “I don’t know whether this case can be resolved by way of summary disposition,” Ballinger said at a brief hearing in October. “Maybe yes, maybe no, but I don’t believe it can be resolved by way of a motion to dismiss…. If you think you’ve got a summary judgment motion, well, bring it on, and that will force the other side to put up the evidence and we can find it out.” Cross has alleged, in support of the claim that a Ponzi scheme was ongoing, that Cook bounced checks at Valliance Bank at least 257 times between January 2019 and August 2019.“Despite the incredible series of substantial overdraws and suspicious Ponzi activity in the Cook Enterprise accounts for close to a year, Valliance managed to prolong the existence of the Cook Enterprise to assure that Valliance received payment in full at the expense of all other creditors of the Cook estate,” the trustee argued in a July response to the motion to dismiss.

The legal cannabis trade, still in its infancy, is flailing in many parts of the country as the pandemic boom that sent sales soaring has tapered off, the Washington Post reported. Supply is now flooding the market in several states, economists say, depressing prices and decimating already-thin margins. And competition is sure to escalate as decriminalization spreads, large growers adopt more cost-effective technologies and the illegal market not only endures, but thrives. The turmoil is mostly lost on consumers because weed is the rare commodity untouched by the pervasively high inflation blanketing most other goods and services. In fact, retail prices have fallen 10 percent this year in California, the nation’s largest market. It also compounds the challenges unique to this industry: Because marijuana remains illegal federally, businesses must navigate a labyrinth of overlapping regulations — creating confusion and occasionally chaos. Essentially unable to raise prices, many cultivators and vendors are slashing them in hopes of generating any cash at all. By many accounts, the industry is struggling against unprecedented uncertainty and poised for what Keats is calling the “Great Reset.”