(SeaPRwire) –
By: Robert Kensington
This wasn’t a legitimate dispute between two corporate parties. It was a deliberate attempt to kill a disruptive corporate strategy. LZG International dragged Genius Group through U.S. courts for 18 months. All to block it from deploying capital into Bitcoin and AI assets. The whole scheme relied on false statements to secure a preliminary injunction. Most activist attacks on public companies stop at shareholder votes. This one weaponized the U.S. court system to freeze core operations.
Official records confirm the timeline of events. On March 13, 2025, the Southern District of New York granted the injunction to LZG. The injunction blocked Genius from issuing shares, raising capital, and buying Bitcoin. The Second Circuit stayed the injunction just two months later, on May 7, 2025. The appeals court vacated the injunction entirely with an order filed August 31, 2026. Before this ruling, an ICC arbitrator ruled fully in Genius’s favor on April 16, 2026. The arbitrator ordered LZG to return 7,387,374 Genius common shares. It also awarded $6,595,180 in damages and $1,375,988.53 in legal fees to Genius. What the official release does not highlight is the cost of this delay. Genius was blocked from executing its $1.2 billion capital plan for 18 full months. Any other small-cap public company would have collapsed under that pressure. Most cannot absorb 18 months of blocked operations and mounting legal bills.
Official next steps lay out a clear path for Genius now. With the injunction vacated, the company can execute its full capital plan. The $1.2 billion funds two treasury arms: Bitcoin Treasury and AGI Infinity Portfolio. The company targets $2 billion in total assets by FY2031. The 7.4 million shares LZG must return are part of a 30.1 million share retirement plan. This will remove those shares from public float, boosting existing shareholder value. Genius also continues to advance a RICO case against LZG insiders Michael Moe, Peter Ritz, and other co-defendants. The suit is filed in Southern District of Florida and seeks over $750 million in treble damages. Any net proceeds from the case will split 50/50. Half goes to shareholder distributions, half buys more Bitcoin for the treasury. The industry subtext here is this kind of legal ambush is growing more common. Activist groups and former insiders use baseless injunctions to force fire sales of stock. They profit from the resulting price drop, even if they lose the case years later. Genius won here because it had the cash and grit to fight for 18 months straight. Most small-cap public companies do not have that luxury.
Only public companies that can defend themselves against these legal ambushes will be able to pursue unorthodox treasury strategies like holding Bitcoin and AI assets. Over the next decade, that will reshape public market valuation hierarchies permanently.
Author bio: Robert Kensington, an overseas entrepreneurial veteran with decades of experience in industrial investment and expansion.