By Jan C. Wehmeyer, Tobias Fuchs, and Jacob Shamsian
In 2023, a wellness entrepreneur pitched Klaus Kleinfeld, the former CEO of Siemens and Alcoa, on an opportunity to invest in Deepak Chopra's meditation app.
Kleinfeld invested $2.5 million. Now federal prosecutors say the entrepreneur, Wanja Oberhof, embezzled most of that money, using it for personal expenses including back rent on his nearly $20,000-per-month Manhattan penthouse.
In the criminal complaint against Oberhof filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the investor is identified as "Victim-1." A spokesperson for Kleinfeld confirmed that he was the investor.
Oberhof co-founded the Healing Company with his wife, Anabel Oelmann, a former model and owner of a CBD oil company, with the aim of acquiring a stable of wellness brands. Chopra, the author, physician, and wellness guru, became the Healing Company's chief scientific advisor in 2022. The startup in March 2023 struck a deal with Chopra's company, Chopra Global, to acquire Chopra's consumer product line, including a detox kit and body oils; the Chopra meditation and wellbeing app; and licensed Chopra health retreats at resorts and spas, corporate filings show.
Chopra Global terminated its deal with the Healing Company in July 2024, and no longer has any relationship with the Healing Company or its affiliates, an attorney for Chopra and his company told Business Insider.
According to the criminal complaint, the Healing Company borrowed about $1.6 million against its line of credit for a March 2023 deal with an author and alternative medicine advocate. The details of the transaction match details of the Chopra deal disclosed in the Healing Company's corporate filings.
The following account is based on the criminal complaint:
Oberhof and Kleinfeld, both Germans, had met in Germany through a mutual friend. When they reconnected in New York in 2023, Kleinfeld was interested in the startup's newly acquired meditation app. Early the following year, the Healing Company defaulted on its credit line. Oberhof and Kleinfeld discussed moving the author's app and other assets to a new entity, in which Kleinfeld would invest. Kleinfeld understood from Oberhof that Oberhof could only move the assets if Oberhof paid back the loan against the line of credit. They agreed that $1 million of Kleinfeld's $2.5 million investment would be used to pay back the lender.
Instead of paying back the lender, Oberhof took most of the money for himself, moving more than $1.8 million of it to a German bank account, according to the complaint.
An attorney for Oberhof declined to comment.
Sources close to Kleinfeld say that his lawyers approached US authorities with evidence of the alleged fraud a few weeks ago. Officials were already building a case, the sources said.
Oberhof was charged with one count of wire fraud and made an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday. He hasn't yet entered a plea. Oberhof is being held at Metropolitan Detention Center, the federal jail in Brooklyn that also houses Venezuela's former president Nicolás Maduro.
Herbert Bauernebel contributed reporting.
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