Maky Zanganeh and Bob Duggan.

Scientology billionaire Bob Duggan and his wife and co-CEO Maky Zanganeh of Summit Therapeutics (SMMT) have been targeted for a possible class action lawsuit by the powerhouse securities law firm Pomerantz LLP.

From the Pomerantz LLP press release: 

The investigation concerns whether Summit and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices. 

On May 30, 2025, Summit issued a press release “announc[ing] topline results from the Phase III clinical trial, HARMONi, the first global Phase III study evaluating ivonescimab[.]” Although patients treated with ivonescimab and chemotherapy were 48% less likely to progress or die than patients who received chemo alone, the drug failed to make a statistically significant difference in overall survival, a metric that measures how long patients live before dying of any cause.

On this news, Summit’s stock price fell $7.99 per share, or 30.5%, to close at $18.22 per share on May 30, 2025.

Summit Therapeutics stock shot up above $33.00 on positive news. However, this news may not have been entirely accurate and this caused concerns. This good news was followed by news that Summit’s cancer drug Ivonescimab does not appear to have the efficacy it hoped to achieve. This caused the stock to crash into the $17.00 range.

What happened? This is what Pomerantz LLP seeks to determine on behalf of SMMT investors.

What to look for next: Any letters from the SEC to Bob Duggan and Maky Zanganeh.

Covering Scientologists and their money never gets old.

It is just like Uber drivers at the airport: As soon as one leaves, another one arrives shortly if not immediately. It was just a few weeks ago that Scientologist David Gentile was sentenced to seven years in prison and now a big law firm is looking into Bob Duggan.

This is how it all began at GPB Capital Holdings: A securities law firm issued a press release. We will continue to monitor and report on events at Summit Therapeutics.

The notorious Scientology Ponzi schemer Reed Slatkin (1949-2015) credited Bob Duggan for teaching him everything about finance in the 1980’s. This was when Bob and Trish Duggan lived in Santa Barbara along with Slatkin.

Seeing what a criminal liability Slatkin was becoming, Duggan distanced himself from the conman. Nevertheless, as is the usual practice in Scientology, Slatkin swindled many of his fellow Scientologists including Greta Van Susteren, Mark Ishman, Anne Archer, and Giovanni Ribisi.

The Church of Scientology turned a blind eye to Slatkin’s activities for many years because he kicked up an obligatory cut of the action to the Church in the form of religious donations. In Scientology one is saved by money and not faith; when the money runs out, so does the salvation. We can paraphrase the Epicureans here in Scientology terms: Eat, Steal, and Go Clear, for tomorrow we die. 

Reed Slatkin’s $593 million Ponzi scheme unraveled and he was convicted of what was then the largest Ponzi scheme in US history. Slatkin’s record was later obliterated by Bernie Madoff; Robert Stafford; Tom Petters; and his fellow Scientologist David Gentile.

Slatkin was sentenced to 14 years in Federal prison in 2003. Two years after his release, Slatkin died at age 66 in 2015. Slatkin was profiled in a 2008 episode of American Greed. 

Bob Duggan’s Summit Therapeutics has a market cap of $14.65 billion and is much larger than GPB Capital which peaked at $1.8 billion AUM.

Summit Therapeutics has commanded a great deal of interest because of Bob Duggan’s previous success when he made $3.2 billion after selling his old company Pharmacyclics to Abbvie. Bob and his now ex-wife Trish Duggan donated 100,000 shares of Abbvie to David Miscavige dba as the IAS and the Church of Scientology. 

Many investors think Bob Duggan can make lightning strike twice with Summit Therapeutics. Duggan, 80, paid a Chinese company $500 million for the rights to its anti-cancer drug ivonescimab which is the basic molecular structure Summit Therapeutics is working to up-engineer into Duggan’s next multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical.

From today’s chart on SMMT:

We previously documented Bob Duggan’s murky ties to the mysterious Scientologist Ali Shawkat, whose father Mudhar Shawkat was a member of Parliament when Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. The Shawkat’s moved $140 million out of Iraq. The money was of such dubious provenance that even Appleby’s in London refused to take it. However, Appleby’s being Appleby’s found a way justify taking it as an investment. At least $5 million of the Shawkat money was donated to the IAS by Ali and his wife Noor.

Ali Shawkat then invested $14 million in fellow Scientologist Matt Feshbach’s ill-fated Bahamian stem cell clinic Okyanos. Feshbach sold the company under extremely mysterious circumstances. The Okyanos facility in Freeport was utterly destroyed by the devastating Hurricane Dorian in September 2019. The new owners wound up the company and defaulted on a $12 million loan to its “main lender” and we have no idea who that could be.

During this timeframe, Matt and Kathy Feshbach filed bankruptcy in an attempt to discharge $3.8 million they owed the IRS. The US Tax Court said no and specifically cited the Feshbach’s profligate spending on their luxury lifestyle. The court noted that the Feshbach’s had the money to repay the IRS the entire debt but instead chose to hire a personal chef; spend a fortune on entertaining in their home; splurging on lavish personal wardrobes; and rented a second home in Vail, Colorado.

We also uncovered Duggan’s ties to Hong Kong via former Sea-Org-member-turned-wealthy-Scientologist Michael Holstein who, it appears, became wealthy due to his work for Bob Duggan in Hong Kong. There was also Bob Duggan’s mystery company Spang Magnetics in Hong Kong. As we reported, the links between Duggan-Shawkat and Holstein were all there in the Panama Papers:

The Panama Papers diagrams on Bob Duggan appear to have been scrubbed; however, we have all of the documents.

In 2018, Pomerantz won a $3 billion class action settlement in its lawsuit against Petrobras, the Brazilian-owned energy company. This scandal was called the Lava Jato (Car Wash) and resulted in the arrests of dozens of Brazilian politicians, bankers, and many other crooks who were embezzling taxpayer money from Petrobras.

During our long coverage of GPB Capital, we reported on the enormous Petrobas scandal which brought down Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of Eduardo Cunha, then Brazil’s Speaker of the House. 

During his tenure, Speaker Cunha funneled $21.3 million in embezzled Petrobras funds to GPB Capital’s office in the Cayman Islands. This was done through Cunha’s Swiss banker David Munio Suarez of UBS Bank, a notoriously dirty Swiss bank. UBS has paid $31.785 billion in fines in the US since 2000. For UBS, it is all a cost of doing business.

UBS Switzerland has done a great deal of banking for the Vatican. Given UBS’ proven law-breaking and propensity for crime, what connections UBS may have with Scientologists operating out of Scientology’s Milan Org and the Swiss Canton of Ticino is of very high interest to us.

Bob Duggan is now being investigated by Pomerantz LLP. The press release: