Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Prosecutors say $1.8m of Klaus Kleinfeld's $2.5m investment moved to a German bank account
Klaus Kleinfeld agreed that $1 million of his $2.5 million would clear a defaulted credit line before Deepak Chopra's meditation app moved into a new entity. Prosecutors say Wanja Oberhof kept the money.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Wanja Oberhof pitched Klaus Kleinfeld, the former chief executive of Siemens and Alcoa, in 2023 on investing in Deepak Chopra's meditation app, and Kleinfeld put in $2.5 million.
- A criminal complaint in the Southern District of New York identifies the investor as "Victim-1", and a spokesperson for Kleinfeld confirmed to Business Insider that he was the investor.
- The two men agreed that $1 million of the investment would repay the lender on the Healing Company's credit line, which the company had defaulted on early in 2024.
- Prosecutors say Oberhof embezzled most of the money and spent it on personal expenses including back rent on his nearly $20,000-a-month Manhattan penthouse.
- Oberhof faces one count of wire fraud, appeared in Manhattan federal court on Monday without entering a plea, and is held in Brooklyn; his attorney declined to comment.
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Why it matters
- decision Anyone funding a carve-out from a defaulted borrower has one choice to settle in the documents: whether cash earmarked for a creditor is paid to that creditor or to the counterparty who owes it.
- cost Kleinfeld carries the loss until something comes back, and the money the complaint follows had already crossed into a foreign bank account before any charge was filed.
- constraint If the lender was still owed what the complaint says was drawn, $1 million would not have cleared it, so the condition on which the asset transfer depended was underfunded before any money moved.
- precedent Kleinfeld's route gives other investors in the same company a template: take the evidence to prosecutors who are already investigating, and let the criminal docket set the timeline.
The man who stood to be paid set the condition that made this deal make sense. According to the criminal complaint, Kleinfeld understood the sequence from Oberhof: the loan drawn on the Healing Company's credit line had to be repaid first [13]. Only then could the app and the other assets move into a new entity. The lender was the one party outside the transaction who could have put that payoff figure in writing. Buying assets out of a borrower that has already defaulted is a workout, and the lender's claim is the thing being cleared.
The complaint says the Healing Company borrowed about $1.6 million against that line of credit for a March 2023 deal with an author and alternative medicine advocate. The details match the Chopra transaction disclosed in the company's corporate filings [9]. The $1 million the two men earmarked covers about 63% of that draw [3]. The complaint, as described by Business Insider, does not say what was still outstanding when the company defaulted, so the real gap may be larger or smaller.
Names carried the startup's credibility. Chopra had been the Healing Company's chief scientific advisor since 2022 [6]. In March 2023 the company agreed to buy his consumer product line, the Chopra meditation and wellbeing app, and licensed Chopra retreats at resorts and spas [7]. The asset Kleinfeld wanted was the app. Its value rested on a licensing relationship a third party could end. Chopra Global terminated the deal in July 2024, and an attorney for Chopra and his company told Business Insider that there is no longer any relationship with the Healing Company or its affiliates [8].
Kleinfeld knew Oberhof socially first. The two men, both Germans, met in Germany through a mutual friend and reconnected in New York in 2023, when Kleinfeld took an interest in the newly acquired meditation app [10]. Oberhof had co-founded the Healing Company with his wife, Anabel Oelmann, a former model who owned a CBD oil company, with the aim of acquiring a stable of wellness brands [5].
The control at issue here is cheaper than diligence. Money earmarked to retire a named loan can be wired to the lender, or held and released against the lender's payoff letter. On the complaint's account the funds went to Oberhof instead. The sum traced to a German bank account exceeds the figure the two men agreed would reach the lender by more than $800,000 [2]. That is at least 72% of what Kleinfeld put in [1].
Kleinfeld's lawyers approached US authorities with evidence of the alleged fraud a few weeks ago, sources close to Kleinfeld say, and officials were already building a case [17].
What to watch
- Whether Oberhof contests or pleads to the single wire-fraud count, and whether prosecutors add counts.
- Any effort to recover the funds the complaint places in a German bank account, which would test cross-border restitution.
- Whether the credit-line lender or other Healing Company investors surface as claimants in the SDNY case.