“Bring Magic Mushrooms”: Inside Vancouver's Carbon Streaming Scandal
A lawsuit alleges Carbon Streaming ran a consulting carousel, where insiders were paid through numerous vehicles for minimal to no services
The Email That Says Everything
On January 6, 2023, Anthony Milewski had some unusual packing instructions for fellow executives ahead of a luxury ski trip in Utah.
"Make sure and bring your…magic mushrooms," he allegedly wrote to Ontario lawyer Maurice Swan and other Carbon Streaming Corp. directors.
Milewski had nicknames for the team. Andrew Tester, a fisherman-turned-director, was "The Liquor." Another director, Conor Kearns, should “get sexy suits."
The email about bringing illegal psychedelics wasn't just executive excess, if true—it was a window into how a $148 million public company allegedly became a personal playground for insiders who treated investor money like their own private trust fund.
Repeat Button Stuck on Repeat
If the names sound familiar, they should. Some of the same players (to be clear, not all) were behind a few of the most spectacular flameouts in recent Canadian market history:
Cobalt 27: A speculative cobalt venture that collapsed under debt, price volatility, and shifting battery trends, wiping out most shareholder value.
Uramin: A uranium company later denounced by some in the French press as une escroquerie.
Voyager Digital: A crypto exchange that imploded, leaving behind lawsuits, frozen funds, and allegations of Ponzi-like payouts.
Now they're back—some of them—with Carbon Streaming, and according to a blistering lawsuit filed by the company's new leadership, they may have outdone themselves.
The Core Cast
The lawsuit names the following key figures:
Maurice Swan – Chairman of Carbon Streaming. His firm, Stikeman Elliott, previously served as legal counsel to issuers tied to Anthony Milewski, including Cobalt 27. Before that, he was counsel to LSC Lithium—a company that Michael Beck told a podcaster he co-owned with Stephen Dattels.
Michael Beck – Consultant to Carbon Streaming. A longtime associate of Ian Burns and Dattels, Beck co-founded Uramin, and later advised Cobalt 27 and Nickel 28 through Regent Advisors. He also co-founded Cobalt 27 and Voyager Digital.
Jeanne Usonis – Director and consultant at Carbon Streaming. She is Beck’s business partner at Regent Advisors and a fellow co-founder of Cobalt 27 and Voyager Digital.
Justin Cochrane – Founder, CEO, president, and director of Carbon Streaming. A founding executive of Cobalt 27, he allegedly co-founded Oregon Group with Milewski.
Andrew Tester – A fisherman-turned-director at Carbon Streaming. He allegedly worked for Oregon Group while serving on Carbon Streaming’s board.
Conor Kearns – CFO of Carbon Streaming. Previously CFO of both Cobalt 27 and Nickel 28, and before that, was at Digital257, a Vancouver promotional firm used by Beck and Dattels.
Anthony Milewski – The highest-paid consultant to Carbon Streaming. He co-founded Cobalt 27 alongside Beck, Usonis, Cochrane, and others.
Not Gotham, Just Vancouver
Before diving into the lawsuit, it’s worth understanding a fundamental flaw in Canada’s microcap system: retail investor disclosure, or rather, the lack of it.
This space has two layers. One is visible, what you see on Sedar or YouTube. The other runs underground, like a gas pipeline. Every broker and securities lawyer in Vancouver’s capital markets knows who controls the valves, and most are gas conglomerate clients. Turn a valve, and a new issuer pops to the surface and onto a stock exchange, seeded with friendly directors and anonymous founders pulling the levers behind them.
It’s not exactly Gotham City—but if it were, retail investors would be Commissioner Gordon, left in the dark.
Take Carbon Streaming. The shell they used came from Colin Watt, an associate of Michael Seifert. Watt also provided the shell that became Voyager Digital (Seifert, Usonis, Beck, Dattels, among others). Watt also supplied the shell for LSC Lithium, where Maggie Watt, a paralegal tied to Seifert, appeared in the paperwork, along with Burns, Dattels, and Beck. If we go way back, Watt also came through for Axmin’s uranium deals. And Watt provided the shell for Minerva Intelligence Inc. (now Aisix Solutions Inc.), where Guy Elliott, another longtime associate of Dattels, Burns and Beck, teamed up with Beck and Milewski.
Cobalt 27 later used investor funds to buy shares in Minerva, which Nickel 28 inherited. To outsiders, the move made no sense. But it made perfect sense to those controlling Cobalt 27 and Minerva, because both were seeded and steered by some of the same underground hands. Everything was entre famille. Investment decisions were about what worked for the family as a whole.
Recognizing that there’s an underground layer where issuers are incubated and pre-populated matters for two reasons.
First, equitable disclosure. These issuers—and their anonymous founders—depend on retail investors to exit. But the system is designed to shield those same investors from the most important information. Disclosure is asymmetrical. Underwriters, lawyers, and brokers see everything—underground and above ground. The public sees only the surface.
So while these insiders need retail capital, they don’t believe retail investors deserve access to fulsome information, and they won’t provide it. With that kind of imbalance, the average investor is statistically guaranteed to get burned.
Second, this lack of transparency deprives the public of material information they need to make informed decisions.
Think of it this way: would you have invested in Carbon Streaming if you knew some of the same people tied to it were behind Voyager Digital? Maybe, maybe not. But you were never given the chance to make that call. That’s the problem.
This lawsuit matters because, for once, it pulls the underbelly of anonymous actors from the underground layer to the surface.
Consulting Ourselves Rich
Carbon Streaming launched in January 2021 with a lofty mission: build a platform to buy and sell carbon credits, helping companies offset their emissions.
Two years and $148 million later, according to a former CEO, the company still hadn’t built the basic infrastructure for a carbon credit exchange. But the lawsuit alleges it built something else entirely: a consulting carousel that funneled investor cash to insiders.
The Triple-Dipping Strategy
Start with Michael Beck and Jeanne Usonis. According to the lawsuit, each was paid through three separate channels for what the company describes as “little to no bona fide services.”
Beck's Revenue Streams:
Regent Advisors (co-run with Usonis).
Angstrom Capital (his Bermuda shell company).
Carbon Advisors (a joint venture with Milewski).
Usonis's Revenue Streams:
Direct compensation as director-consultant.
Analogue Capital (her Bermuda shell company).
Regent Advisors (with Beck).
One of Beck’s listed responsibilities? “Reviewing and advising on the business plan”—something ChatGPT could do for free.
Deals with Milewski
According to podcast interviews, the idea for Carbon Streaming originated with Milewski. But the lawsuit claims some investors wouldn’t fund the venture if he were directly involved, so he became its consultant. That allegation is a glimpse into how the underground pipeline works: key decisions were made by actors who live below the surface.
Milewski allegedly drew compensation through three separate entities for services the lawsuit claims were “not performed”:
Black Vulcan: US$1.48 million.
Oregon Group: US$1.5 million.
Carbon Advisors: US$400,000—despite having no formal contract.
In one brazen example, both Oregon Group and Black Vulcan were allegedly paid US$500,000 for the same project: distributing energy-saving devices across Africa.
The lawsuit also claims that CEO Justin Cochrane secretly co-owned Oregon Group with Milewski. Carbon Streaming didn’t just pay Oregon Group—it allegedly built the company’s website and hired a PR firm to run its marketing.
Tester’s Double Dip
According to the lawsuit, Andrew Tester, the Oregon fisherman they put in as a director, was on two payrolls at once, working simultaneously for Carbon Streaming and Oregon Group.
Luxury Perks on Investors’ Dime
While Carbon Streaming burned through investor cash without building its core infrastructure, the lawsuit alleges that executives and their lawyers found ample time and company money for lavish perks and magic mushrooms.
The lawsuit describes three luxury trips paid for by the company: two extreme ski trips to Utah and an extravagant animal hunting expedition.
The Ski Trips
Carbon Streaming’s Utah trips became an annual tradition, with private snowcat access to untouched slopes at resorts like Park City or Deer Valley. Snowcat skiing alone typically cost US$20,000 per day.
The guest list was tightly controlled: Carbon Streaming executives Swan, Cochrane, Kearns, and Tester, plus several executives from Nickel 28 (another Beck-Swan-Cochrane-Kearns-Milewski-connected company).
Milewski, officially just a consultant, didn't merely attend—he organized the trip and sent the infamous magic mushrooms email.
These weren’t just expensive getaways. They were exclusionary, forming an inner circle of executives who were literally and figuratively above the clouds while the company floundered below.
The Gun Trip
A year later, the group escalated to an animal hunting expedition at Highland Hills Ranch, a luxury resort in Oregon that offers deer and bird hunting with chef-prepared meals starting at $6,700 per person per night—the same rate as Dubai's famously extravagant Burj Al Arab hotel.
The tab: US$134,000 total. Carbon Streaming paid US$80,000, while Nickel 28 covered US$50,000. The guest list included Swan, Cochrane, Kearns, Tester, executives from Nickel 28, lawyers, and outside parties—completely blurring the lines between business and personal indulgence.
Conflicts of Interest
The governance failures outlined in the lawsuit suggest that oversight at Carbon Streaming was fundamentally broken. Directors allegedly approved payments to entities they controlled, or to entities they knew were not just conflicted but tied to relationships they were failing to disclose to investors.
Jeanne Usonis authorized payments to herself, to her partner Michael Beck, and to Milewski, with whom she was involved in other issuers.
According to new management, Swan signed off on questionable transactions. In other instances, Cochrane allegedly circulated emails containing materially false information. Swan, who was copied on the correspondence, failed to correct the inaccuracies despite his obligation as a lawyer to do so.
The web of overlapping relationships made effective oversight impossible. Everyone was conflicted, it seems, and no one was watching.
The $57 Million Vanishing Act
Perhaps the most damaging chapter was Carbon Streaming’s relationship with Infinite Earth Limited, supposedly a supplier of carbon credits from Indonesia. Instead, it became a financial black hole.
Carbon Streaming advanced:
$22 million in cash upfront.
$4 million in consulting fees.
22,695,000 shares worth $31 million.
Total advanced: US$57 million.
Carbon credits received: zero.
The situation worsened when CEO Justin Cochrane allegedly joined a new venture called EmergentGlobal alongside principals from Infinite Earth—while Carbon Streaming was simultaneously pursuing arbitration against those same individuals.
A similar disaster unfolded in Mexico, where Carbon Streaming advanced $2.4 million for carbon credits that never materialized.
The One-Month CEO
There were outward signs the company was in trouble by early May 2023, when the President abruptly departed just months after the magic mushroom ski trip. That was Geoff Smith, recycled from Cobalt 27, where he had overseen the cobalt-for-shares IPO as an underwriter at Scotia Capital. One of Scotia Capital’s clients is Regent Mercantile, a firm directed by Dattels and Burns.
With the exit of Smith, the company’s former investment officer was promoted to CEO with a mandate to clean house. He quickly flagged the excessive consulting payments and moved to terminate the agreements with Beck and Milewski.
But according to the lawsuit, Swan and Cochrane pressured him to reverse course and reinstate the deals. Less than a month into the job, the CEO resigned in frustration.
The lawsuit implies a clear message: the consulting carousel would keep spinning, no matter who sat at the top. And it made something else crystal clear—the company didn’t come first. The shareholders didn’t come first.
According to the allegations in the lawsuit, Beck, Usonis, Swan, Cochrane and Milewski came first.
Note: The lawsuit contains allegations that are unproven.