Philippe Vandemoortele

Philippe Vandemoortele is the Belgian who paid for the last three years of Stan's work and bought the land the Development Center was to stand on. He was at the table at the Grove City Cracker Barrel on Friday 20 March 1998, when Stan collapsed. Most of what has been said about him since is rumour: that he was one of two investors, that he was from NATO, that he fled the country that night. This page sets out what the public record shows instead: a Belgian company register, a Belgian official gazette, a county auditor's sales ledger, and the one statement he has given.

Who he is

He was born in 1945 in Izegem, West Flanders, where the Vandemoortele food group was founded in 1899. The group made its name in margarine and edible oils. Philippe developed the soya drink that became Alpro: the idea began in the 1970s as a simple, nutritious product for Madagascar, and Alpro itself was founded in 1980 as a Vandemoortele subsidiary at Wevelgem. The family sold it to Dean Foods in 2009 for about US$455 million.

He left the family business in 1995, the year he met Meyer. Letec's own publicity later described him as a "Belgium industrialist, entrepreneur and 2008 INSEAD Innovator Prize recipient". The archive has not found the prize citation itself.

With Stan, 1995 to 1998

"I met Stan at the beginning of 1995," he wrote in 2020, "and found his project interesting for its possible contribution to mankind. We became friends and I supported him financially until his death." By his account he was the only backer, not one of two.

In Belgium, the company register shows a business in his own name opened on 14 April 1997, an employer registration with no company name, which closed on 16 April 2004. Six months after it opened, Stan's fax of 23 October 1997 addressed him as "WFC Europe Industry" at an address in Bellegem, south of Kortrijk. The 2004 founding deed of his later company gives that same address as his home. No company called WFC Europe Industry, or anything like it, appears in the Belgian register. It looks like a name Stan used for Vandemoortele's side of the project rather than a separate firm, but the record doesn't settle it.

The fax asked for US$21,000 "immediately" to start the survey crew and the site-plan filings for a Grove City council meeting on 11 November 1997. In January 1998 the Grove City planning commission approved a research campus on 56 acres of Seeds Road.

The land

The Franklin County Auditor's sales ledger records the purchase. On 17 February 1998, five weeks before Stan died, two Seeds Road parcels passed to "Vandemoortele Philippe F":

That is 56.5 acres for $1,979,215, the 56-acre campus of the January approval. He bought it in his own name, not in Stan's or the Water Fuel Cell's. That explains something in the probate file: Stan's estate listed no real estate at all. The campus was never Stan's to leave.

He kept the land for five and a half years after the death. On 24 October 2003 it passed, for no recorded price, to PFV Seeds Park Associates. The initials are his, and it was very probably his own holding vehicle, though the archive has not seen its registration. On 18 July 2005 both parcels were sold to Washington Holding Co. for $1,508,679, about $470,000 less than he had paid. They have changed hands twice since.

The weekend

The campus was to be inaugurated on Saturday 21 March 1998, and he arranged a weekend visit around it: in on Friday the 20th, out on Sunday the 22nd. At Stan's request he brought Marc Vancraeyenest to help with communication by computer. On the Friday evening they went to dinner with Stan and his twin brother Stephen. "A few minutes after we were seated, Stan has a brain problem, an ambulance comes and he leaves with his brother." Stan died the next day. The two men flew home on the Sunday, on the flight that had been booked before they came. The full account, set against Stephen's, the coroner's and the newspapers', is on The day Stan died.

Afterwards, by his account, Stephen asked him to go on funding the work, and he refused: "I felt too much greediness, secrecy and lack of knowledge and ideal. For me, it was over. Stan was my friend and nobody else." The Franklin County coroner's office had the two Belgians described to it as "NATO officials". The police file held no recorded interviews with them. The Columbus Dispatch's calls and e-mails in 2007 went unanswered. He spoke only once, in July 2020, to the Dutch writer Pepijn van Erp: "What is certain is that I didn't kill him, he was my friend and I even paid his bills the week before."

Letec, 2004 to 2023

Six years after Stan died, he went back into invention, with the same companion.

• 27 February 2004. Before the notary Bernard Boes at Kortrijk, he and Marc Vancraeyenest found Letec NV. Each takes 100 of the 200 shares, and the capital is €200,000. The registered seat is his home in Bellegem. The company's purpose is "the development, research, production, application and commercialisation of all technologies and applications in the field of light therapy, bioresonance, biofeedback, biophysics and cell research".
• 4 March 2004. He becomes chairman and managing director, and Vancraeyenest becomes director in charge of day-to-day management. His 1997 sole-trader registration closes six weeks later.
• 2005 to 2009. The seat moves from Bellegem to Knokke, then to Bruges.
• 16 March 2011. The partners turn €4.8 million of subordinated loans to the company into shares, €2.4 million each, which takes the capital to €5 million. The auditor's report notes that equity had been negative at the end of 2010.
• 2014 to 2015. He puts in a further €3.9 million claim against the company, with his shares in two other companies, Lergon NV and an Anti-Stress Mind & Body Institute. New directors from Belgium, France and the Netherlands join the board. By October 2015 the capital stands at €19.3 million, and at the end it was €26.8 million.

The product was the Xentix, a device applying light and pulsed magnetic fields, marketed in the Netherlands against burn-out through Letec Life Enhancement BV of Eindhoven. Letec Life Enhancement paid for a randomised, placebo-controlled trial at the Coronel Institute of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam: 90 workers, three arms, twelve weeks. It was published in BMC Public Health on 2 October 2017 and found "no statistical differences between the three groups … on the primary outcome or on any of the secondary outcomes". Van Erp, writing about the Xentix in 2014, had come across the founders' names before, in his file on Stanley Meyer. It was to him that Vandemoortele wrote in 2020.

The company was renamed Healtech in 2017. It was declared bankrupt by the Ghent enterprise court, Bruges division, on 8 March 2019, and the bankruptcy was closed by liquidation on 17 April 2023.

The one Letec patent filing that names him is US 2012/0078328, filed in 2010 with Vancraeyenest and an American co-inventor. Its magnetic coils are wound with bifilar wire, the winding of Stan's resonant charging chokes. It appears in none of the 2004 filings, which Vancraeyenest made alone. The table of Letec's patents is on The day Stan died.

What is still open

• The 1998 deeds. The Franklin County Recorder holds the two deeds of 17 February 1998 (conveyances 980002576 and 980002577). They would name the seller and the exact form of his title, and might mention the Water Fuel Cell. The archive has the auditor's ledger, not the deeds.
• PFV Seeds Park Associates. Its Ohio registration, if it had one, would say who stood behind it from 2003 to 2005.
• Grove City, January 1998. The planning commission's minutes would name the applicant for the campus and what was to be built.
• WFC Europe Industry. Whether it was ever more than a name on a fax.

Sources

• Belgian Crossroads Bank for Enterprises: Letec / Healtech NV, 0863.730.857; Vandemoortele, Philippe, 0859.402.182.
• Belgisch Staatsblad, annexes for legal entities, all publications for 0863.730.857. In particular: the founding deed, 8 March 2004; the appointments, 19 March 2004; the 2011 capital increase; the 2014 contributions; the bankruptcy, 15 March 2019, p. 266; and the closure, 26 April 2023, p. 162.
• Franklin County Auditor, sales summaries for parcels 040-007497-00 and 040-007499-00, read 2 October 2026.
• Pepijn van Erp, "Stanley Meyer, the inventor of the water-powered car, was not killed by Belgian investors", 10 November 2020.
• Pepijn van Erp, "De Xentix – technobluf van Letec tegen burn-out", Kloptdatwel, 15 December 2014, and "De Xentix doet niets bij burn-out", 13 October 2017.
• K. Nieuwenhuijsen, A. M. C. Schoutens, M. H. W. Frings-Dresen and J. K. Sluiter, "Evaluation of a randomized controlled trial on the effect on return to work with coaching combined with light therapy and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy for workers with work-related chronic stress", BMC Public Health 17:761, 2 October 2017. Funding: Letec Life Enhancement BV, Eindhoven.
• Alpro, Wikipedia; Vandemoortele, our history.