Avangard was a company in the Netherlands providing an enterprise-oriented product based on and with device management and other added features. They were doing a genuinely good job and were supporting both the GrapheneOS and Molly projects financially.
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There were some misunderstandings about their connection with GrapheneOS but overall we were on good terms with them. There are a bunch of companies using GrapheneOS to build products and most of them haven't supported us to the extent they were. It unfortunately didn't work out.
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The founder vanished and we had to help their users migrate to the official GrapheneOS releases. We were quite upset about the whole thing and thought they'd cut off contact. Our understanding now is that the Spanish government arrested them on bogus charges which were dismissed.
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The information we have is that they were held for an entire year based on charges which were completely dismissed. Their business is obviously in ruins after a year of being unable to manage it. They'll be collaborating with again and trying to rebuild something.
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Do you mind sharing your sources? How can we verify that? I tried to find anything anywhere about this... but my google foo seems to be very bad. Thanks.
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Spanish court documents, current/former Spanish police, person who was arrested, their brother, their former business partners, their former clients and their competitors.
I doubt there's any news coverage about it and that's not how we have information on what happened.
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Spanish court documents are public once the investigation ends (even if the trial hasn't or the judge prohibited it), you can share them (or the case number). I'm really interested on what happened and how this links to Spain trying to access devices/whatever, as you mentioned.
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I said we were concerned about it being an attempt to compromise devices and that's why we had a sense of urgency about helping their clients including the legal firm migrate away from it. Their business was definitely a factor but wasn't a major part of the charges they filed.
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It's not clear if they had any intention to try to compromise the devices. The devices are mentioned in court documents and are presented as something nefarious and tied to criminals. It's likely some of their users were criminals especially via legal firm but not most of them.
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Providing secure devices to lawyers with a private messaging app to communicate with each other and their clients is hardly involvement in organized crime.
We don't have a public link to court documents and don't know how to find them that way. Not knowing Spanish doesn't help.