There is speculation that the creators have a special interest in the project as they sell mining equipment specifically suited to mine the equihash algo. Also, the team initially pre-mined blocks for the purpose of holding an ico, which never happened. These blocks may still be pre-mined.
The only mining equipment I can see on their website that can mine equihash is a 8x GPU Miner (RX470 4G) no different to what you can buy at your local computer shop just prebuilt
There is still a plan to do a small premine as far as I know which I cannot see a issue with
People complain about other coins/forks saying they sold out to whoever and cannot be trusted etc etc all devs need to be paid they don't work for free especially if done full time what would you rather have a small premine and be self financing or taking corporate funding and be branded as selling out