A new book has claimed that a Pakistani name Arif Naqvi fooled billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates of around USD 100 million. Naqvi was once the head of private equity firm The Abraaj Group and he used to make money for investors while doing good for the world. Naqvi used to spend time with super rich and powerful people, including Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
But Simon Clark and Will Louch wrote in their new book, “The Key Man: The True Story of How The Global Elite was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale” that Naqvi was a conman who used to fool super rich people.
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According to the book, Naqvi siphoned off USD 780 million from his funds, USD 385 million of which remains unaccounted for. Nqvi is now facing a long jail term. And all because “while Arif was in New York, the employee broke ranks and sent an anonymous e-mail to investors . . . [warning] about years of wrongdoing at Abraaj.” It was a bombshell that led to the “largest collapse of a private equity firm in history.”
Born in 1960 in Karachi, Pakistan, Naqvi studied at Karachi’s highly selective grammar school and then went to the London School of Economics.
Naqvi established Abraaj in 2003 after raising $118 million, much of it from “Middle Eastern governments, royals, and traders.” Naqvi’s downfall was triggered by one of his employees who in 2017 sent an anonymous email highlighting his misdeeds.
Naqvi was invited by President Barack Obama, along with 250 other Muslim business leaders, to a Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in 2010. “It can only happen,” Naqvi told the gathering, “through entrepreneurship.” The US government invested $150 million in Abraaj after two months.
“Arif gave millions of dollars to universities around the world, including Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and the London School of Economics, which named a professorship after Abraaj,” the authors write. “Following in the footsteps of billionaire philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, Arif started a $100 million charitable organization called the Aman Foundation to improve health care and education in Pakistan.”
Naqvi lived a luxurious lifestyle, flying around on “a private Gulfstream jet with a personalized tail number — M-ABRJ — and sailed on yachts to meet new investors who could help increase his fortune.”
By 2007, Naqvi had moved into “a palatial new mansion in Dubai’s luxurious, gated Emirates Hills district . . . known as the Beverly Hills of Dubai.”
Naqvi used to attend Davos and similar conferences, where he met Bill Gates and other billionaires.
“Bill and Arif had much to discuss,” the authors write. “They agreed that their charitable foundations would work together on a family planning program in Pakistan. Arif seemed to be precisely who Bill was looking for. He was wealthy and concerned for the poor.”
Gates Foundation granted USD 100 million to Naqvi to invest in hospitals and clinics in emerging markets and this investment helped Naqvi get USD million more from other investors.
“This is a significant co-investment partnership,” Gates said about the deal. “It is also an example of the kind of smart partnerships that hold huge promise for the future.”
In reality, Naqvi had already started misusing the money with a “secretive treasury department” that not even most of his employees knew about, the authors write.
“Abraaj was really made up of a tangled web of more than three hundred companies based mostly in tax havens around the world.”
After Naqvi’s employee write the email, the a forensic accounting team was hired by Gates Foundation to investigate Abraaj’s books. “Bill shifted uncomfortably in his seat and pursed his lips,” the authors write. “Whenever Arif attempted to make eye contact or engage him in conversation, Bill looked the other way.”
Finally, Naqvi was accused by US prosecutors of running a criminal organization and he was arrested on April 10, 2019 at London’s Heathrow Airport.
