Chuck Rifici

Chuck Rifici is a Canadian cannabis-industry entrepreneur, best known as a co-founder and early CFO of Tweed Marijuana / Canopy Growth Corporation, one of the first publicly-listed cannabis companies in North America. He subsequently founded Inovia Capital and several follow-on investment vehicles.

In 2021, Rifici led an attempt to acquire MindGeek through Bruinen Investments Inc., a vehicle structured around an “ethical turnaround” thesis: assemble a board of former-RCMP advisors (including Chief Superintendent Derek Ogden, formerly head of the RCMP’s Drugs Program) and Crime Stoppers International personnel, conduct an audit-led acquisition, retain operations under reformed governance. The bid was code-named Project Narsil. It failed in late 2021 / early 2022 after Crime Stoppers International declined to publish the audit report it had been commissioned to produce. The Crime Stoppers audit’s non-publication is itself a significant data-point in the case.

Ethical Capital Partners (also Canadian, also constructed with former-law-enforcement and audit advisors) completed an acquisition of MindGeek in March 2023 under structurally similar lines.

¶Where his role figures

• Brunien-ECP and MindGeek-Aylo — the canonical case for Project Narsil and the structural relation to the eventual ECP transaction.