Why we are suing Finans.dk
A Romanian CEO on why the Danish way isn’t the only way to be professional
A Danish investor recently asked me a question that sounds brutally reasonable:
“Why on earth are you suing a newspaper for two million euros when your company has no cash and faces insolvency?”
Seen from Copenhagen, it looks like madness. From a Nordic boardroom, it probably confirms a convenient story: the CEO has lost perspective; a proper CEO would accept the hit, work through official channels, and move on.
From Bucharest, the picture is different. Where I come from, when someone attacks your integrity in a way that threatens your company and the savings you have personally invested in it, you do not fold your hands and wait politely for a committee to rediscover fairness. You document. You speak. You fight. Not because it is good PR, but because any other response feels like collaborating in your own destruction.
That instinct did not come from nowhere. In 2017 I went through a brutal insolvency of a previous venture—long before Shape Robotics, long before Danish listing, long before Finans cared who I was. I know exactly what it means to lose everything you have built, to see value evaporate while you are still answering calls from creditors. I know it from the inside, not as a case study.
So when people suggest that I am casually gambling with the company, or with other people’s capital, they are talking about a man who has already been burned once and still decided to put his own money back on the line as a significant shareholder in Shape Robotics. When the share price fell, it was not an abstract line on a screen. It was my own savings, my family’s future, the equity stake I chose to hold because I believed in what we were building. I lost real value alongside every other shareholder.
This is the person you are telling to “just let it go”.
The year I tried to do it the Danish way
In April 2024, a market professional called me. For more than ninety minutes, he drew out specific details about our financing—the structure, timing, and expected impact. It was textbook material non‑public information being extracted on tape.
Soon after that call, 318,331 shares traded with timing so precise it might as well have been scripted. Buys at the bottom, sells at the top. Not a lucky coincidence; a trading pattern that matched the information window almost perfectly.
I did not take this to LinkedIn. I did not start shouting names. I did exactly what Nordic governance orthodoxy says I should do:
I filed complaints with the Danish FSA.
I informed Nasdaq Copenhagen.
I prepared a detailed whistleblower filing to the SEC.
Everything was done quietly, documented, “through proper channels”.
What followed was silence. Months of it. No visible enforcement, no communication to the market, no indication that the evidence I had provided was being treated with urgency.
In that vacuum, another narrative had space to grow.
Finans stepped into that space. Instead of digging into the insider‑trading evidence, they reached back into my past and dragged out a Romanian insolvency case from 2017—civil, complex, and completely unrelated to Shape Robotics today. The nuance was stripped away. The message was simple: this CEO is tainted, this company is dangerous, and investors should be afraid.
The stories landed at the worst possible moment, just as we were fighting to replace lost state‑backed financing and explaining a severe liquidity crunch to the market. Lenders read those headlines. So did analysts, journalists, and board members. Some of the very people who had sat in meetings with me, fully aware of my past and satisfied with the explanation, suddenly discovered a new courage: the courage to quit.
When the board chose the exit over the truth
One by one, board members left.Not because they suddenly discovered my 2017 insolvency—that had been disclosed from the beginning in our corporate documentation and annual reports. They left because I refused to sweep the trading evidence under the rug and move on.
I pushed for clarity. I asked them to stand with me and say publicly what had happened with the April call, what evidence existed, and what we had done about it. I wanted us to come clean with shareholders instead of pretending nothing unusual had occurred.
That would have meant admitting that someone close to the company appeared to have
abused information. It would have meant risking conflict with people who still moved comfortably through the Nordic financial ecosystem.
They chose the quieter path. Resignations instead of confrontation. Carefully worded statements instead of straightforward explanations. The boardroom emptied in exactly the moment shareholders needed it to stand its ground.
It is easier, after all, to distance yourself from a noisy Romanian CEO than from an insider network that might one day sign your next term sheet.
The Romanian operating system
At that point, the difference between “Danish” and “Romanian” responses snapped into focus.
The Danish system works beautifully when institutions are healthy and everyone plays by the rules: you route complaints into the proper channels, you keep your personal emotions out of sight, and you trust the process to sort things out. You might lose in the short term, but you will be treated fairly over time.
The Romania that raised me does not tell that story. We were ruled by empires, dictatorships, and imported reforms that treated us as material, not as citizens.[web:1378] We learned that institutions can be captured, that “proper channels” can be used to delay and smother inconvenient truths, and that if you do not speak for yourself, you will simply not be heard.
In that culture, dignity is not expressed by your ability to remain invisible. It is expressed by your willingness to stand in the square, put your name and your documents on the table, and say: this is what happened; if you disagree, meet me in court.
So when Finans’s articles froze into accepted truth and the official complaint routes continued to produce silence, my Romanian operating system overrode the Nordic script. I chose not to die quietly. I filed a lawsuit against Finans in a jurisdiction where the case would be judged on documents and law, not on who knows whom at the Friday bar. I did it publicly, because secrecy was already part of the problem.
To some investors, that looked like desperation. To me, it looked like the minimum level of self‑respect.
Professionalism, or gatekeeping in a suit?
This is where the notion of “professionalism” becomes a weapon.
In the Nordic setting, professionalism is often code for disappearing into the process. You speak in short, neutral sentences; you trust regulators and big media to define the narrative; you do not show anger; and you certainly do not drag the system itself into the spotlight. The unspoken rule is that institutions deserve deference, even when they fail you.
Where I come from, professionalism includes the ability to fight for your shareholders and for your own name when those same institutions do not do their job. A CEO who watches obvious wrongdoing, watches his own reputation being destroyed by half‑truths, and responds with a resigned shrug would not be praised for composure. He would be suspected of either weakness or guilt.
So when I write long, detailed explanations of my position, or when I insist on a court deciding whether Finans defamed me, I am not having an emotional breakdown. I am following the standards my background set for what an honest leader does in a crisis.
A Dane may read that as “too much”. A Romanian reads it as “finally someone refuses to bow.” The danger is when one culture’s reflex is allowed to define the global standard. If only a narrow Scandinavian style counts as “fit for a listed CEO,” then every leader from outside that micro‑culture is forced into an imitation.
Diversity becomes cosmetic: different names, same behaviour. I am choosing not to imitate.
The money question
Let’s talk about the two million euros.
Because the company is fighting for survival, it is easy to frame the claim as an absurd vanity project: “He wants cash from a newspaper while his own shareholders are underwater.”
That framing ignores three facts.
First, I am one of those shareholders. I have taken the same hit you have. I did not sell at the top. When the price collapsed, a large part of my own net worth collapsed with it.
Second, the Finans coverage had measurable consequences. Financing that might have been difficult became nearly impossible. Counterparties who had accepted my background when they knew the full context suddenly treated it as toxic when it was repackaged as a simple “Romanian insolvency plus indictment” headline from 2017. If a court later rules that that packaging was misleading or defamatory, the damage is not abstract. It sits in the gap between a viable refinancing and the possibility of an insolvency filing.
Third, in legal practice, serious defamation is corrected not only with small footnotes but also with damages that sting. If there is no cost to crossing the line between harsh but fair criticism and character assassination, powerful media have every incentive to keep pushing that line. A damages claim is how you translate “this did real harm” into a number the system recognises.
You may disagree on the amount. But to call the entire action “ego” is lazy. It is an attempt, once again, to turn a structural question into a personality problem.
Why I care how this looks ten years from now
Will this battle make my life harder in the Nordic ecosystem? Absolutely. Some institutions will never forgive the fact that I dared to put them under the same scrutiny they routinely apply to everyone else.
Some investors will permanently classify me as “too noisy” or “unmanageable.”
But my calculation is longer than the next mandate.
Somewhere, a future Eastern European founder is watching this unfold. He or she will have a different accent, a different story, but the same dilemma: play along with the local script, or insist on bringing their own instincts into the room. If I roll over now—if I agree that my role is to accept whatever Finans chooses to write, whatever boards choose to conceal, whatever regulators choose to delay—then I am helping to teach that person a lesson: keep your head down and your mouth shut, or the system will crush you.
If I see it through, even if I lose, the lesson is different: there is at least one example on record of someone who refused to pretend that the Danish way is the only respectable way to react.
I can live with being the wrong kind of CEO for some people. I cannot live with teaching my daughters that, when someone distorts who you are in public, the grown‑up response is to smile politely and swallow it.
The Danish way is not evil. It is just not the only way.
And my whole point, really, is that a European market mature enough for global capital should be mature enough to handle more than one way of being a serious, responsible, and—yes—professional CEO.