Christian Ellul and Karl Schranz built E&S Group around a business model that sat squarely inside Malta’s international corporate-services, tax, financial and emerging cryptocurrency industries. By 2018, the firm was presenting itself as a growing multidisciplinary operation with more than 40 people and a strong position in Malta’s blockchain sector. Ellul was its public-facing legal and business figure, while Schranz, an accountant with previous experience at JPMorgan Chase in London, developed the group’s corporate-finance and token-related activities. The company promoted work involving corporate structures, tax, financial services, iGaming, ICOs and blockchain.
The regulatory record that followed is considerably more complicated. On May 8, 2020, the Malta Financial Services Authority took action personally against both men. The regulator said Ellul had breached provisions of Malta’s Company Service Providers Act, the Rules for Company Service Providers and the Code of Conduct for Trustees. Most significantly, the MFSA said his conduct and business relationships demonstrated a “lack of honesty and integrity.” It ordered him to divest qualifying shareholdings in RES Malta Ltd. and SOLV International Ltd. and prohibited him for five years from taking new appointments or acquiring shareholdings requiring MFSA approval in entities supervised by the regulator.
Schranz received substantially the same regulatory treatment, but with an additional direction to resign from his previously approved positions at RES Malta and SOLV. The MFSA cited breaches of the Company Service Providers Act, the CSP Rules and the Code of Conduct for Trustees, again specifically referring to what it described as a lack of honesty and integrity. The five-year restriction applied to him as well.
Those measures did not arise in isolation. A year earlier, on November 18, 2019, the MFSA had cancelled E&S Consultancy Limited’s registration as a company service provider. The regulator cited breaches of several provisions of the Company Service Providers Act and CSP Rules, including requirements concerning fitness and propriety, notification of material changes, legal proceedings and other obligations imposed on registered providers. The cancellation was subsequently challenged by E&S. In June 2024, the Financial Services Tribunal rejected the company’s appeal and confirmed the MFSA decision; on September 24, 2025, the Court of Appeal rejected E&S Consultancy’s further appeal and confirmed the tribunal’s decision in full.
The underlying dispute was partly about what E&S had told regulators about developments involving the Malta Gaming Authority. Court records show that in 2018 the MGA determined that Ellul, Schranz, E&S Consultancy and several related companies did not satisfy its fitness-and-propriety requirements. The MFSA later treated the MGA determination as a material development that should have been disclosed to it promptly and in writing. The company argued that its directors had verbally informed the MFSA’s chief executive in January 2019 and later reported the matter in an annual compliance report. The tribunal nevertheless considered the notification requirements had not been satisfied.
The regulatory concerns also extended into the people and businesses with whom E&S had worked. One of the most prominent was Slovak businessman Marián Kočner, who was Ellul’s former father-in-law. E&S acknowledged that it had administered two companies connected to the Kočner family and that Ellul had served as a director, but denied wrongdoing. Ellul’s position was that the companies were property-holding structures, that due diligence had been performed and that his involvement had ended before the later criminal allegations against Kočner became central to the public controversy. The company’s legal submissions also argued that it should not be held responsible for allegations arising after its services had ended.
The issue became sufficiently serious to generate litigation over public reporting. E&S Consultancy, Ellul and Schranz brought defamation proceedings over publications and tweets concerning their alleged links to Kočner and claims involving tax fraud and money laundering. In 2022, a Maltese magistrates’ court dismissed four related libel actions. The court stressed that an allegation or reasonable suspicion should not automatically be treated as a declaration of guilt, while also finding that the plaintiffs had not established the serious financial losses they claimed.
Another thread connected E&S to the Argentarius Group and its founder Andreas Woelfl. OffshoreAlert reported that E&S clients included Argentarius entities and that several companies associated with the group later became involved in regulatory and legal disputes surrounding Falcon Funds. Bank of Valletta’s 2019 judicial letter named 158 individuals and companies whom it intended to hold responsible for losses it might incur in connection with Falcon Funds. The documents referenced claims by Sweden’s Pensions Agency concerning damages, with at least €79 million cited in the material supplied for this investigation. Separately, MaltaToday reported the wider Falcon Funds affair involved €247 million of Swedish savers’ money. Those figures should not be interpreted as a finding that Ellul or Schranz personally caused those losses; the Bank of Valletta document was a legal notice identifying respondents against whom responsibility was being asserted.
The supplied records say E&S representatives subsequently wrote to Malta’s Business Registry in December 2019 saying they had lost contact with several Argentarius-related clients, including ETI Securities, Delta1 Securities, Commonwealth Securitisations and Argentarius ETI Management. The same records point to corporate relationships between E&S-associated entities and parts of the Argentarius structure. They also document wider regulatory problems surrounding Argentarius and Woelfl, including a €4,650 MFSA fine against Woelfl, the cancellation of a licence held by an Argentarius-related investment manager, and action by the Gibraltar Stock Exchange. Again, these events form part of the surrounding business network; they do not establish criminal liability by Ellul or Schranz.
The corporate network around E&S was extensive. Public records and reporting have connected Ellul and Schranz with E&S Group Limited, E&S Consultancy Limited, RES Malta Limited, SOLV International Limited and E&S Back Office Services Limited. RES was registered as a company service provider, while SOLV was authorised to act as a trustee or co-trustee and provide fiduciary services. The MFSA imposed restrictions on both companies after its action against Ellul and Schranz, including prohibiting new client onboarding until the relevant ownership and management changes were made.
There is also an important second side to the story. Ellul and Schranz did not simply accept the MFSA’s decisions. They appealed, and Schranz’s tribunal submissions described the five-year restriction as excessive and argued that he had never been arrested, investigated or convicted of a crime. He disputed the regulator’s interpretation of his relationships with individuals such as Kočner, Woelfl and Vadim Blaustein. The tribunal ultimately rejected the appeals in June 2024. The Financial Services Tribunal’s official records now classify both FST 01/20, Schranz’s case, and FST 02/20, Ellul’s case, as final.
At the same time, Ellul and Schranz succeeded in a separate dispute over the handling of regulatory information. In 2024, Malta’s Information and Data Protection Appeals Tribunal found against the MFSA over the disclosure of confidential information concerning the E&S regulatory action. The Court of Appeal later upheld that finding, and in November 2025 reaffirmed that the MFSA had failed to disprove responsibility for the premature disclosure. The court did not find that the leak was deliberate, but held the regulator responsible for the unauthorised disclosure.
That case remains important because it illustrates the unusual nature of the dispute: the same regulatory saga produced findings adverse to E&S and its principals, while separate proceedings also found the regulator itself responsible for mishandling confidential information. OffshoreAlert’s publisher David Marchant has subsequently disputed the data analysis relied upon in the data-protection proceedings, arguing that the website obtained the MFSA material only after it had appeared publicly on the regulator’s website. That is a contested account, not a judicial finding overturning the 2025 judgment.
There is no credible evidence in the sources reviewed establishing that Ellul or Schranz were convicted of fraud, money laundering or another criminal offence. The documented sanctions against them are regulatory rather than criminal convictions. Their most consequential confirmed regulatory outcomes were the cancellation of E&S Consultancy’s registration and the five-year restrictions imposed by the MFSA. Those restrictions began in May 2020 and, on the ordinary five-year calculation, expired in May 2025. The tribunal proceedings themselves became final in 2024.
Their present public business footprint is also worth noting. E&S Group remains publicly active in Malta, with its website identifying Karl Schranz as chief executive officer and listing its St Julian’s office. Schranz continues to be presented as involved in corporate finance, tokenomics, ICOs and related advisory work. Ellul’s public LinkedIn profile has stated that his involvement with E&S had become limited, although he continued to express pride in the firm’s work.
The record therefore does not support the simplistic conclusion that two corporate advisers were convicted fraudsters. It documents something more specific, and in some ways more consequential: a long regulatory confrontation involving corporate-service obligations, fitness and propriety, disclosure requirements, politically and criminally sensitive business relationships, and a series of appeals that continued well beyond the original 2020 sanctions. For clients, investors and anyone using professional intermediaries to build companies or financial structures across jurisdictions, the lesson is straightforward. Reputation is not established by a corporate brochure or a list of successful projects; it is tested when regulators examine the people, relationships, disclosures and controls behind the structure. In the E&S case, those questions produced regulatory sanctions, successful challenges on some issues, unsuccessful challenges on others, and a legal record that remains relevant well after the original headlines have faded.
Source:
OffshoreAlert
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