German national Rene Schwarze, who was implicated in the high-profile Gambian diplomatic passport scandal in 2021, has been briefly arrested by authorities after resurfacing last week.
Following his departure from the Gambia, the digital footprints of Schwarze shows he fled to Turkey where he adopted the fictional persona “Jensen Robles” to allegedly orchestrate a crypto-Ponzi scheme called Vortic United that eventually collapsed in an exit-scam.
Now back in the Gambia, his arrest and a failed deportation attempt have sparked political controversy due to his close ties with opposition NDP leader Kebba Madi Bojang.
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By Mustapha K Darboe and Awa Macalo
An international figure who has spent years reinventing himself across continents has once again landed in the custody of Gambian law enforcement. Rene Schwarze— also known as Rene Scharwe—, a German national who has masterfully alternated between the roles of a “state-backed investor” and a corporate cryptocurrency CEO, was shuttling between the custodies of the police serious crimes unit and immigration since last week.
Rene claimed to have converted to Islam in 2020 taking over the name Muhammad after marrying a Gambian girl. Since he resurfaced in Banjul, all media platforms kept calling him Muhammad Rainey, yet another passive or deliberate effort to reinvent him.
While the exact nature of the current allegations remains murky, this is far from Schwarze’s first encounter with Gambian authorities—having previously found himself entangled in a high-profile diplomatic passport scandal between 2019 and 2021. The police and state prosecutors would tag him the 18th suspect, but one who would not see the inside of a court room.
His digital footprints show Rene left the Gambia in 2021 shortly before a Malagen investigation conducted by The Republic’s editor into his activities and those of his supposed investors was published. His operations moved to Turkey, another place he allegedly ran a similar ponzi scheme, as in the Gambia.
In 2026, Schwarze resurfaced, but this time not dealing with people at the Presidency or the President’s party— as was the case in his earlier life— but in his relations with an opposition leader who left the President’s NPP party to form his own National Democratic Party (NDP) in 2026.
Following his trouble with the immigration, which followed a police interrogation, the NDP leader alleged Rene has relationships with a lot of high profile individuals including an opposition leader, interior minister and police commissioners, the relations with whom have never been investigated.
“… Why didn’t they investigate his relations with those?… Why mine? When I did not print my T–shirts at Rene’s, he was never attacked,” said the NDP leader Kebba Madi Bojang, who told The Republic that he has only known Rene for two years. “This was not about Rene. It is an attack on the NDP.”
… the ‘fake’ diplomatic passport
It is unclear when Rene returned to Banjul or if he even physically left the country. However, Kebba claims he has already filed papers seeking to become a Gambian citizen. His story in Gambia begins around 2016 when the country returns to democracy. People flew in to scour for investment opportunities.
Just about the same opportune time, Rene arrived. Though he would soon register at least six companies in the country, none of which were doing any visible business at the time, he managed to live in the shadows, with little attention. In 2019, something happened that forced him into the public limelight, or at least enough noise to get the attention of investigative journalists.
Dozens of leaked Gambian diplomatic passports stormed social media sites, sparking public outrage. Under pressure to act, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs promised an inquiry, swift actions and held meetings with diplomats to assure them that the precious red books will not fall into wrong hands. It already was!
A simultaneous police inquiry and audit by the National Audit Office (NAO) soon commenced. The police inquiry indicted Rene. The legal opinion by the Ministry of Justice recommended him to be charged for obtaining goods by false pretenses and making false documents, charges he denied.
The charges were based on the testimony of Christian Mahlig, a “businessman” who testified to giving Rene €10,000 to process a Gambian diplomatic passport for him. The police report shows Mahlig eventually received the diplomatic passport but they claim it was a counterfeit.
The legal opinion reviewed by The Republic shows the State intended to use Mahlig as the “11 witness” in what later became a series of poorly prosecuted trials, all of which collapsed on their faces. The German national, described online as the Chief Executive Officer of Coaching Solution and President of Rescue Foundation, never took the dock.
Incidentally, when the diplomatic passport for Mahlig was being printed, at least 1,959 diplomatic passport books went missing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an audit by the National Audit Office found. The police investigation failed to probe any potential connection between the “counterfeit” passport produced for Mahlig and the missing diplomatic passport booklets from MOFA.
The police investigators claimed Rene allegedly gave money to three government officials to facilitate the passport’s creation. Though Rene soon left the country— or made it look like it through manipulation of his digital footprints— before these cases made it to the court, all of them collapsed under the weight of poor prosecution, exacerbated by the State’s lack of interest in them, said a senior prosecutor at the Ministry of Justice. In May 2023, Mahlig, who is now on Facebook calling Rene a fraudster wanted in Germany, donated 13 CCTV cameras to the Ministry of Interior. The Republic has not established any link between this donation and Mahlig’s earlier testimony.
The “investor” with no investment
The trial began in 2021 following a groundbreaking investigative report published by Malagen, which unmasked Schwarze as a textbook “investor who does not invest.”
Arriving in the Gambia under the guise of an influential financier capable of pulling in massive foreign funding, Schwarze managed to gain unprecedented access to the highest echelons of state power. He told the police investigation that he paid a Gambian politician— a one-time youth minister and now a presidential adviser— Henry Gomez 4,000 Swiss francs to get an audience with the President.
Gomez admitted he received money but only 3,000 Swiss francs— which he claimed was a voluntary gift or “appreciation” from Rene’s associate Andreas Brandl Helmut also known as Andi— rather than a bribe to see the President. Andi too did receive a diplomatic passport but auditors could not trace records of his passport in either the immigration or the ministry of foreign affairs database, suggesting his passport might have been one of 1,959 missing books at MOFA.
Regardless, not only did Rene see the President, proof of their meeting was documented in pictures first published by Malagen. The state prosecutors who reviewed the police investigation asked for further inquiry into Gomez but this was never done.
During his multi-year operation, Rene registered at least six different companies and brought in various groups of associated “investors”—none of whom ever executed any tangible domestic investments.
He was allegedly linked to notorious international Ponzi orchestrators, including the founders of FutureNet, a scheme regulators in multiple countries have found to be fraudulent.
The visual proof of his high-level infiltration is captured vividly in a picture with Barrow, which shows a smiling, clean-shaven Schwarze wearing a traditional white and silver grand boubou and a grey chechia cap, warmly shaking hands with the Gambian leader inside the State House. Following the intense scrutiny and exposure generated by the Malagen investigation, Schwarze appeared to have quietly slipped out of the country.
After Rene, “Jensen Robles”
Schwarze did not stay in the shadows for long. On May 3, 2023, The Republic’s editor received email communications from an investigative journalist from BehindMLM revealing that Schwarze had successfully fled to Turkey. The writer of the story on Behind MLM, which heavily relied on Malagen’s story, established the identity of who is now Jensen Robles.
Soon after the BehindMLM story, his Vortic United company attracted the attention of several ponzi analysts who made a series of videos exposing the alleged “scam”.
Operating from Istanbul, or at least claiming to have, he had established a new crypto-Ponzi scheme called Vortic United. Schwarze appeared to undergo physical rebranding, adopting the fictional persona of Jensen Robles, the company’s purported founder and CEO.
He gained weight— deliberately or not— and grew his beard, though his physical features, including his generous smile and frequent chuckles, remain strikingly the same.
According to the investigations, Schwarze was operating a platform that regulators and ponzi-scheme investigators have described as fraudulent directly out of Turkey which was reportedly linked to Russian organized crime syndicates to back the operation.
The fraudulent scheme strategically targeted unsuspecting financial consumers across Pakistan, Germany, and the United States. In August 2023, the activities of Vortic United were flagged by California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.
On February 20, Central Bank of Russia listed Vortic United among a list of “entities with detected signs of illegal activities in the financial market”. The scheme eventually collapsed in August 2023 via an “exit-scam,” leaving its investors empty-handed.
Whether as a sign of a paranoid ponzi artist on the run, or not, Rene’s house is covered by CCTV cameras throughout, according to Kebba Madi Bojang in his interview with Kerr Fatou. Malagen reporters observed the same heavy surveillance at Rene’s office at the Sky Blue Plaza, along the Bertil Harding Highway, when they met him there between 2020 and 2021.
“There was much to see in what seemed like an impenetrable obscurity of Rene and his office. There is no signboard – the only office that does not have one. There are 4 security cameras at the front, the entrance and back of the office – no office has that on that building,” reported Malagen.
AI analysis
Despite his weight gain, heavy beard growth, and claims of “hypothyroidism” to explain his changed appearance, our own comparison of his distinct facial architecture across both sets of images points to the same person — though this is our visual analysis, not a forensic or biometric finding, and readers should weigh it as such.
By cross-referencing the photographic evidence compiled, using artificial intelligence, several features support what we believe is a resemblance between Rene and Jensen.
The dimple lines on either side of his nose are distinctly misaligned when he smiles. The fold on his right side begins significantly higher up near the nasal bridge, while the fold on his left side sits lower, curving wider and deeper across his cheek. This highly specific, irregular muscular trait remains identical across his younger, clean-shaven persona and his older, bearded appearance.
All his pictures analysed by The Republic, using AI, the distance between his eyes, the heavy set of his eyelids, and his slight squint when smiling appear consistent. The curvature and attachment of his earlobes appear unchanged between the historical Gambian imagery and his appearances as “Jensen Robles.”
Rene surfaces, gets arrested
Having exhausted his playground in Eastern Europe following the Vortic United collapse, Schwarze made a bold return to the Gambia, embedding himself back into local influential circles.
Since his return to Banjul, Rene managed to stay out of the public limelight until he attended a political gathering of Kebba Madi Bojang, a prominent Gambian politician formerly affiliated with the President’s National Peoples Party (NPP) who now serves as the leader of the NDP. His pictures came online, prompting questions from people with whom he crossed paths.
There is no publicly available relationship between Schwarze and the NDP as a political entity but the police reportedly found a machine in his house printing T–shirts for the party. The party leader Kebba claimed to have bought the machine and handed it to Rene’s wife who is skilled at printing T–shirts.
“I gave Rene’s wife D3.5 million dalasi for her to buy printing equipment because they have solar in their house and it’s 24hours electricity. The wife has the talent to print T-shirts. I was empowering her,” Kebba told The Republic.
In his interviews, Kebba denied Rene is putting his money into the NDP’s activities. In a brief interview with Kerr Fatou, shortly after his arrest, Kebba claimed there is nothing more than friendship between him and Rene, denying any suggestion he contributed in his procurement of pickup vehicles and motorcycles for the party.
Rene was at the NDP rally in Jambur on June 13 where he sat at the VIP section, next to Kebba Madi Bojang. Dressed in an embroidered gold-patterned grand boubou, a black chechia cap, and sporting white headphones around his neck, he wears a bright blue ceremonial NDP party sash bearing the text “H.E KMB NDP”. Following his speech, Bojang went to give him a hug after greeting a number of attendees at the VIP section, before the event dispersed.
On July 1, the opposition leader informed Kerr Fatou that Gambian authorities had declared Rene persona non grata on June 30. However, the deportation attempt failed at the airport following the intervention of his lawyers who challenged its legality. The next day, High Court Justice Sonia granted a defense request to restrain the state from deporting Rene, pending the court’s final determination of the matter.
Bojang has his own share of trouble in his relationship with Rene. He reportedly spent his Monday night outside of the detention unit of the police anti–crime where Rene was being detained.
He was also literally dragged out of the “investor’s” residence on June 30, the day the immigration had a failed attempt at deporting him. Bojang claimed aside from his relationship with Rene, which troubled the authorities, the German national has friends in the government, including a state minister and within the police command.
We sent questions to Rene, through who we were told is his assistant, but did not get a reply until the time of this publication.
