Billion-dollar firm founder ‘stacks the deck’ with leaked recording

A leaked recording reveals the Kiwi founder of the billion-dollar supplements company AG1 misrepresented his criminal history in public statements and in a meeting with the company president and staff this year.
Responding to a query from a YouTuber, Chris Ashenden’s high-powered American lawyer claimed he had never been charged with a crime, or convicted of a crime, or been the subject of an arrest warrant.
The former Auckland police officer has won business acclaim in the United States for building his company AG1 into a market leader; his green powder supplement is endorsed by stars such as Joe Rogan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sir Lewis Hamilton. 
But back in his home country of New Zealand, victims of his Auckland and Invercargill housing schemes have spoken out on the podcast Powder Keg, calling for the millionaire to pay his unpaid fines and reparations.
His failure to disclose his criminal convictions emerged as part of a wide-ranging podcast investigation into the supplements industry’s lack of science and regulation, and the outsized role of influencers such as Rogan and the scientist Dr Andrew Huberman, who are paid millions of dollars to promote AG1. 
Ngaio Peters was working six part-time jobs in 2005 to pay for the three-bedroom house she’d thought she’d purchased in the South Auckland community of Papakura.
But the money wasn’t going to the bank, it was going to one of Ashenden’s investors. She thought she was giving her three kids a step up in life. “I thought I had something, but really I didn’t,” she says. “I feel like I failed.”
That was her only chance to own a home. She eventually received a somewhat token $2300 in reparations – which barely scratched the surface of the $100,000 she’d put into the house. Other families got nothing. 
Peters says Ashenden should pay his companies’ reparations: “He gets to move forward and have the opportunity to gain in achievements and through his life. While myself, I’m still in the same place of owning nothing.”
Of 15 Auckland families, four ended up being evicted and three simply walked away from their homes. It was a similar story for the six Invercargill families.
As chief executive of AG1, Ashenden faced questions from Newsroom and from a YouTube journalist.
He hired a top lawyer to defend himself. Megan Meier had been named Lawyer Monthly Magazine’s Defamation Litigation Lawyer of the Year in 2023. She and her partners won a US$787m case against Fox News for spreading disinformation about the 2020 US presidential election. 
However, Newsroom’s year-long investigation, reported in the new DELVE podcast, has revealed the claims she made on Ashenden’s behalf in May weren’t correct. 
As well as instructing Meier, Ashenden called a staff meeting at short notice in May, to rebut questions about his criminal history. This related to property schemes he operated in Auckland and Invercargill, more than 15 years ago, that ended with people losing their homes – and Ashenden with 43 convictions.
He told staff: “In May 2011, I borrowed money and I paid back the fines and reparations that I got from the court case, effectively resolving the issue and making those 15 customers whole.” 
“I haven’t always fully spoken in detail about the mistakes I made with each and every one of you, frankly. In the very earliest days when a lot of this stuff happened, that was mainly probably driven by embarrassment.”
AG1 president Kat Cole (who has now been promoted to chief executive) told the meeting that the company would issue statements over its own channels to “stack the deck of facts and information in our corner”.
And sure enough, in July updates to a public statement on Substack, Ashenden claimed that he was only found to have infringed regulatory offences resulting exclusively in monetary fines.
That’s not correct either. He had been convicted of criminal offending.
After Newsroom continued asking questions, Ashenden apologised then resigned as chief executive in a “progressive transition” – but he remains a director of AG1, and still won’t acknowledge his criminal convictions and his defunct companies’ unpaid fines and reparations.
The Powder Keg podcast investigation launched last week and went to No 1 on New Zealand’s Apple Podcast charts at the weekend.
A new episode, available now to DELVE+ subscribers first, talks to the woman who first blew the whistle in a complaint to the Commerce Commission, and to Ashenden’s business partner in the Invercargill scheme.
Business partner and man-on-the-ground Glen Herud was initially charged, but prosecutors dropped the charges when he cooperated by disclosing details of Ashenden’s operations. He paid his company’s court-ordered fines and reparations.
Herud says he hadn’t intended to rip anyone off, but now acknowledges people were hurt in property deals in which he and Ashenden’s companies pretended to sell houses to low-income families. Some of those families ended up being evicted; others were forced to just walk away from the houses they’d thought they owned.
His full interview is available on the Powder Keg podcast this week.
“I don’t think I was deliberately dishonest,” Herud says. “Maybe I’m just so casual, which probably bites me in the ass a lot.
“Chris had been aware that this was going on for about two years. And he said, oh, look, we’ll look after you, my lawyers are all on top of it. So he rang me up and he said, whatever you do, don’t talk to the Commerce Commission. Oh my gosh. It was the worst advice ever.”
Ashenden, who had left New Zealand to set up his celebrity-backed supplements firm before the charges were laid, didn’t come back for the court case. Instead, he declared himself bankrupt, owing $3 million.
In 2011, Auckland District Court convicted him of 43 criminal breaches of the Fair Trading Act, and ordered the payment of $365,000 in fines and reparations, evenly split between him and his one-man companies.
Contrary to his claims this year, he didn’t pay back those fines and reparations that year. Instead, Auckland District Court was forced to issue a warrant for his arrest in May 2011.
Eventually in September 2014, he paid back the fines and reparations for which he was personally liable – allowing the court to lift the arrest warrant.
But he had wound up his three companies, and so judges in Invercargill and Auckland had no choice but to cancel the fines and reparations that had been ordered against him.
That allowed Ashenden to return to New Zealand to visit his family, and to contract a local manufacturer to produce the green powder supplement for which he’s now famous.
That narrative is starkly different from the story Ashenden has told over the years, and the incorrect statements he made this year. On being questioned by Newsroom, he provided a further emailed statement: “I failed to ensure the dates and specific details that I provided my lawyer and team were fully accurate. I have since corrected what I initially shared.”
Newsroom learned of the arrest warrant after the Commerce Commission supplied case file documents to Ngaio Peters and Anita Mika – two of the Auckland women who had been victims of Ashenden’s property deals. 
Most of the documents from the court cases in Invercargill and Auckland had been destroyed in the Christchurch earthquake – but there were letters that revealed the lengths the courts had gone to, to try to make Ashenden pay his fines and reparations.
“Ashenden is currently resident overseas and there is no indication that he is likely to return to New Zealand in the near future,” wrote commission investigator Gerard Cassidy. “As he is living outside [the] New Zealand jurisdiction we have been unable to collect payment of the fine or reparation. 
“A warrant for his arrest has been issued by the court for the non payment of this reparation. Should he return to New Zealand the Ministry of Justice will be responsible for recovering any money owed.”
“If you have not received any payment by now the only payment you might receive in the future is from Ashenden if he returns to New Zealand. Given that he is still a bankrupt and living overseas we believe it is unlikely that you will receive any payment in the future.”
Ngaio Peters has never been able to buy a home again. She says: “I feel angry and upset at something that I did have, and then lost.”
Powder Keg is reported, filmed and written by Jonathan Milne, with Mike Wesley-Smith. The audio is edited by Dave Filoiali’i and Megan Cumberbatch; the video is edited by Trenton Doyle. Mark Jennings is executive producer.
This project received funding from the Brian Gaynor Business Journalism Initiative. Newsroom is indebted for this support for investigative journalism.