I’m surprised no one has brought this up. Something is not just rotten in the state of Denmark.
It has been brought up many times… 
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Yep! It has been brought up! That’s why there is another thread in the dressage forum called “So I take it we aren’t allowed to talk about Helglstrand video here?”
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The search function helps.
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More than one thread and the one referred above has over 300 posts. 
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Yes. And yet we are talking about it…
Here is the original thread…
ETA: Whoops! @Jenerationx beat me to it! 
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Oops! Sorry I was so shocked I didn’t check well enough. Glad people are talking about it.
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Yes, definitely talking about it.
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The search function on this forum is not always very good at giving up real results, so don’t feel bad that you missed them.
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That’s a fair point.
Helgstrand doesn’t “own” it really. The capital firm that backs him owns it.
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Quibble alert.
Global Equestrian Group smells a lot more like private equity than a [venture] capital firm, a fact that may bode ill for our current platform.
Anyone whose industry and/or job has been altered irrevocably by a PE firm’s purchase knows all too well how that capture usually goes.
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Don’t that owen Ludger/Ludger’s stable as well and hasn’t he been caught on video poling and abusing horses as well?
Honestly; it shocks me that we have global investment firms investing people’s money into horse stables/businesses. Are they actually receiving return on investment or is this like a sham to use other people’s riches to build their empire.
The red flags for me is Helgstrand’s immediate response to the videos this past week without any oversight to what was about to come out of his mouth. Any kind of respectable investment firm that has ownership of their entity would never allow such a thing for PR reasoning, whether he is the CEO of his respective group of the firm or not.
Global Equestrian Group is co-owed by Andreas with many others but who owns Waterland which owns GEG?
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it is. Well, it is owned by Waterland which is an independent Private Equity Investment Group.
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I totally agree…who actually makes real money on horses? Most people at that level have a farm to use as a tax write off…or funneling shady funds lol
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Yup. PE, many not for profits, and hedge funds all have way too many short-selling, money laundering-esque, counter-intuitive methods of increasing capital on paper (mostly for borrowing/valuing/investing purposes) for sane people to comprehend.
Big money in horses has changed dramatically in my adult life. It was one thing when Rolex, a luxury brand with obvious ties to shifty, exploitative gold and diamond extraction plus quadruple digit profit margins happily paid by millionaires, sponsored the Kentucky Three Day as a tax write-off. The Mars Group’s connections make my skin crawl.
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Waterland is a very large, very successful Dutch-run Private Equity firm. It has less than 200 employees. They have raised billions of dollars from outside investors and have ownership pieces in roughly 1000 firms around the world, in a broad range of industries. They mostly provide limited oversight and guidance for the companies they buy into and typically the companies are sold off a number of years later, with $ returned original investors.
So at some point they will sell their piece of Global Eq Group. So I went and watched the video on GEG, it plays like lifestyles of the rich and famous, no signs of rolkur or nasty behaviors in the horse parts. Somewhat interesting is they own a business that has developed “Arena Robots”, kind of like a big Roomba to groom arenas…
Edited to add: typically the PE firms are founded by a couple of people with good prior investment records and good connections to big investors. They may give partnership pieces to a few other people they hire in order to lure them away from other jobs.
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That’s interesting. Can it steer itself around the ring without knocking down jumps?
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The video only shows an empty arena…https://www.equestrian.technology/harrow-bot Next generation will avoid jumps, 
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They say it can be controlled remotely manually by an operator.
In some arenas, sitting on the side or on your horse you can guide it around jumps and trail obstacles.
May even help desensitize horses by riding around with one working.
Great invention, still in their beta operation, not finished tweaking it, worth not needing to run a tractor or UTV or other that compacts the arena just to level and fluff the top?
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