Feds who forced Ukrainian investor to sell rocket company backtrack years later

Enlarge / Firefly Aerospace’s board of directors in the late 2010s: Tom Markusic, Max Polyakov, and Mark Watt. (credit: Firefly)

A long, messy affair between US regulators and a Ukrainian businessman named Max Polyakov seems to have finally been resolved.

On Tuesday, Polyakov’s venture capital firm Noosphere Venture Partners announced that the US government has released him and his related companies from all conditions imposed upon them in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This decision comes more than two years after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the US Air Force forced Polyakov to sell his majority stake in the Texas-based launch company Firefly.