EXCLUSIVE Inside Michael Jordan's Italian getaway as he puffs a cigar on $115m superyacht... and a surprising confidant is revealed
Michael Jordan began his annual grand European tour in style at the weekend when he swapped his private jet for his lavish superyacht in Sardinia - despite fears over his Los Angeles flagship store.
The NBA legend, 62, touched down on the picturesque Italian island with his cohort of nearest and dearest Sunday afternoon as the family kickstarted their summer vacation.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘He left us with nothing': the British investors swindled by a German property firm
'He took everything, left us with absolutely nothing,' says David Middleton, one of thousands of British and Irish investors who racked up huge losses from the collapse of a German property ponzi scheme. The 72-year-old pensioner from Northern Ireland is referring to Charles Smethurst, the German-British businessman who set up Dolphin Capital in 2008, later renamed Dolphin Trust, then German Property Group (GPG), with 200 affiliated companies. In July 2020, the business filed for insolvency, owing more than €1bn to up to 25,000 investors around the world. Smethurst was convicted this month of 'serious fraud' and sentenced to six years and 11 months in prison by a regional court in Hildesheim, in northern Germany. As part of a plea bargain, he admitted to four of 27 counts of commercial fraud, filed against him by the Hanover public prosecutor's office last October, for total damages of €56m. The other charges were dropped in return for his confession to speed up the trial, which was due to run into August. Dolphin's glossy brochures promised readers double-digit returns for investing their money in a scheme that pledged to restore historic buildings across Germany – including the ruins of castle Dwasieden on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen – and turn them into luxury apartments. However, few were ever restored. Investors were mainly from the UK, Ireland, France, Singapore and South Korea and included financial institutions and individuals, many of whom lost their pension pots or other savings after regular interest payments dried up in 2019. Smethurst's fraud conviction related to €60m in investments made by the French fund manager Horizon AM, including €30m in the Pariser Strasse project in Berlin. The court heard that the building was never bought, but the funds were used by Smethurst's company to meet other obligations. He served a prison sentence for fraud between 2000 and 2003 in an unrelated case. Horizon said it was 'led to believe we were partnering with an experienced and reputable real estate developer' as Dolphin provided the firm with 'highly detailed due diligence documents' and sent regular reports wrongly suggesting projects were 'progressing as planned'. The investor was not aware of Smethurst's previous fraud conviction. 'According to findings from the insolvency administrator and the criminal investigation, a significant portion of the funds was diverted abroad to jurisdictions with strict banking secrecy, notably the British Virgin Islands and possibly the Cayman Islands,' Horizon said. 'These jurisdictions do not cooperate with European authorities, which means that the money trail goes cold. This illustrates the systemic failure of cross-border cooperation in cases of fraud, and why victims like us are left without meaningful recourse. 'We are still wondering where the money went, what remains, and whether it is still possible to recover anything to compensate Horizon and its investors.' UK individual investors told the Guardian they are angry, and fear that Smethurst will be released early for good conduct and recover the hidden funds for himself. Middleton and his wife, Janet, invested in Dolphin in 2015: his pension lump sum of £100,000 and her inheritance of £120,000. Their financial adviser, the late Alastair Hooks, told them it was low-risk and supported by the German government, Janet Middleton recalls. 'To be honest, I was nervous about it and strongly stated that as pensioners we could not afford to lose this amount of money, but again we were assured there was no risk.' After Dolphin filed for insolvency, Hooks did not return their calls, and the couple discovered he had unregistered from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in 2012. She says they have explored every avenue – even as they dealt with David being diagnosed with bowel cancer – but have not recovered any of their investment. Janet says Smethurst's sentence 'seems very lenient to me … Smethurst may well serve his sentence and even get early release for good behaviour while other people like David and I now serve a sentence in our retirement economically'. A former NHS nurse, she says the couple had been looking forward to a comfortable retirement but have had to budget their outgoings; they have not had a holiday in years and both drive 20-year-old cars. The Hildesheim court said it did not order Smethurst to make any payments to investors because it could not establish that he had personally siphoned off any funds. Justus von Buchwaldt, of the law firm BBL, the insolvency administrator who testified in June, subsequently said: 'I fear that this is only the tip of the iceberg. It is still unclear if other people were involved in this large-scale fraud and where most of the investments ended up.' Of an estimated €1.3bn of investments received by the property company, about €800m is missing. The Hanover prosecutor's office said it had investigated other company officials but could not find evidence of any wrongdoing. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion It is one of Germany's biggest investment scandals since the second world war, and the German authorities have been criticised for being slow to intervene, even though the property company stopped filing financial accounts in 2015. Alison Moncrieff-Kelly, 63, a freelance musician from Kent and former director of the Rye arts festival, was a Dolphin investor. She said: 'This seems a pathetically small price for Smethurst to pay for such heinous and convoluted levels of crime. Where's the money gone is the big question … and six years 11 months doesn't touch the sides.' Most of the listed buildings acquired by GPG were never redeveloped and left derelict. Von Buchwaldt at BBL has sold 20 of 75 properties so far, for more than €87m, and has yet to distribute the proceeds to investors. Those sold include castle Dwasieden, a listed former brewery in Bad Aibling in Bavaria and a period villa in Fürstenberg/Havel in Brandenburg. The property sales are expected to take years as the legal situation is often complex. Almost 8,000 creditors have filed claims with BBL against the collapsed property group, out of an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 investors globally. Von Buchwaldt has said BBL would work with the UK's FCA, Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). Debbie Kay Randles, 67, invested £25,000 in Dolphin in 2015 and, like others, has also lost money in other investment schemes. She paid £6,000 to a financial claims company in an attempt to recover her Dolphin investment, but 'they just disappeared'. She even enlisted a private detective to track down the claims firm. 'It's just been an absolute ongoing nightmare,' she says. 'I've not got a lot left, so I'll just keep working, probably until I'm 75, and then retire.' A former TSB employee, she now works for a window blinds business and lives in York. Moncrieff-Kelly says the trial 'doesn't address this issue of how incredibly badly regulated financial affairs are in the UK … I don't know if it's happening so much in any other country in the world.' She points to the 'middlemen' – financial advisers who are typically paid commission of 20% to 30% and 'kept that money' despite 'selling a fraud'. She invested in Dolphin after her financial adviser suggested it. Moncrieff-Kelly has recovered about half her £80,000 investment – money she inherited from her late mother – from the FSCS, with the help of a claims company that took the other half as payment. The FSCS says it has paid compensation to more than 1,900 customers in relation to Dolphin/GPG investment products, and a further 150 people have open claims. Compensation may have been triggered in relation to unsuitable financial advice that customers were given. It says it cannot put a figure on the compensation paid because it includes payouts for other investment losses. The SFO declined to comment while the FCA said it could not comment on individual firms. 'People don't understand the trauma and the damage that [fraud] has done,' says David Middleton. 'People think [with] white collar crime, slick City crime, there's no victim. There is a victim.'
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
What's it like to be 23 and starting a new life? I'm unpacking a lot of emotions as my son heads to the US
There's an accurate, if snide, thing I've seen online that reads 'No parent on Facebook can believe their child has turned any age', and yes, OK, not the 'on Facebook' bit, but there is a rote astonishment at time passing that I sometimes slip into, contemplating my adult sons. But, allow me, just this once, a Facebook parent moment. My elder son turned 23 last month and we've just been to London to collect his stuff at the end of his degree. On the way, I realised I was 23 when I moved there myself. You can't often pre-emptively pinpoint parenting 'lasts', but when you can, they're strange and melancholy – even when they're not, objectively, things a person would choose to do again. This trip involved (I hope) my last time standing, hips screaming from the drive, texting 'We're outside' as we waited for our son to wake up (my husband ended up throwing a ball at his bedroom window). It was definitely my last time removing my shoes amid the overflowing bins of that sticky-floored student house, and hovering over the Trainspotting-esque toilet then deciding against drying my hands on any of the towels. It ended with the last trip along the M1 squished between a salvaged chair, a duvet and an Ikea bag of pans threatening to decapitate me if we made an emergency stop. We were bringing his stuff 'home' knowing that it won't be home for him in the same way again: he's moving to New York this summer. Maybe not for ever, but for years, not months. To compound the Big Feelings, and the sense of the dizzying slippage of time, my husband and I used the trip to wander round Fitzrovia, where we shared our first flat back when I was 23. It's different but not unrecognisable: the hospital has been demolished but Tesco is thriving; the Phones 4U where we bought our first mobiles is gone; but the bank where we opened Isas when they were invented, proud of our new maturity, hangs on. Our block had acquired several Airbnb key safes but was otherwise unchanged. 'It'll be baking up there,' said my husband, staring up as the late afternoon sun struck the flat black roof. I made him repeat himself, because I have become slightly deaf this year, then we reminisced about the brutal summer heat (it's probably even worse now). We walked around, pointing out survivors: the famously cheap pizza place, the tiny Italian sandwich shop, the DIY store where we panic bought a fan. Then we sat down for a sensible soft drink, because we were tired and I was struck by an ultra site-specific memory of walking through Percy Passage to meet him one evening, having just discovered I was pregnant with our now-23-year-old, enjoying the last seconds of incredulous solo joy before sharing the news. Then another: shuffling along Goodge Street at dawn in labour, stopping outside Spaghetti House (still there) to ride out a contraction. Both our sons were born in this neighbourhood – it changed my life like no other. The place still felt familiar; what 23 felt like is harder to access. I was a mess, I think: I had been ill and was extremely self-absorbed; I spent far too much time worrying about my weight. I spent little, if any, time worrying about the world, though. World-wise, things felt fine – 'A new dawn has broken, has it not?' Tony Blair had just told us – and if they weren't, it certainly didn't feel like my problem. There aren't many new dawn vibes for my son's generation as they enter adulthood. I'm not sure we've given them much of a chance to spend a few self-absorbed years focusing on their own dramas, have we? We've gifted them more pressing matters: a collapsing climate, catastrophic economic inequality, a crappy jobs market and even the reemerging spectre of fascism and nuclear war (retro!). Plus, it's all inescapably fed into their faces 24/7 – not a feature offered by a 1997 Phones 4U Motorola. But I hope, even so, that 23 can still be what it was for me: confusing but full of possibility. An adventure. The perfect age to find yourself in a new city. Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
Auto Blog
3 hours ago
- Auto Blog
Mercedes-AMG Rivals Should Fear the Specs of the Radical Concept GT XX
The EV four-door race has begun The competition in the world of high-performance electric sedans is heating up, and two of its hottest competitors cannot be any more different from each other. In the blue corner is the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT. When it debuted, the Porsche's hardcore 1,093 horsepower super electric sedan achieved a record-setting lap time around the Nürburgring. However, in the red corner is the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, the first high-performance vehicle from an emerging Chinese consumer electronics giant-turned EV powerhouse. Despite being a fraction of the Porsche's price, Xiaomi's SU7 Ultra managed to pack more power and beat not only the Porsche on the Nordschleife, but also vehicles costing upwards of seven figures. Now, Mercedes-AMG has an answer to both. In the past, it shoehorned lots of horsepower under the hood of luxurious Mercedes-branded vehicles, but recently, it turned a heel toward electrification. The culmination of this is showcased in what it calls the Concept AMG GT XX. The EV from Affalterbach In an announcement on June 25, Mercedes-AMG virtually unveiled its latest creation, a fastback-styled high-performance electric sedan called the Concept AMG GT XX. According to the boffins at Affalterbach, the concept is meant to preview the first vehicle built on its dedicated, AMG-specific AMG Electric Architecture ( ) EV platform. Underneath its skin, the GT XX's advanced electric platform features an 800-volt architecture capable of high performance even while charging. AMG says that the GT XX is powered by a bespoke NCMA battery pack that uses Formula 1 technology and features direct-cooled cylindrical battery cells for better heat management. Additionally, it can be charged up to add nearly 250 miles (400 km) of range in about five minutes at 850 kW. Autoblog Newsletter Autoblog brings you car news; expert reviews and exciting pictures and video. Research and compare vehicles, too. Sign up or sign in with Google Facebook Microsoft Apple By signing up I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy . You may unsubscribe from email communication at anytime. Power goes to all four wheels through two electric drive units (EDUs), which together contain three axial-flux electric motors: two located at the rear and one at the front. All together, the trio of motors makes for a top speed of 223 miles per hour and a combined 1,340 horsepower, which is about 247 more than the Porsche's output of 1,093 horsepower, but still short of the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra's 1,548 horsepower. AMG says that these oil-cooled electric motors are efficiently integrated within the EDUs, and each is equipped with its own planetary gearset and water-cooled inverter. Mercedes describes these EDUs working together as an all-wheel-drive system featuring torque vectoring and full-on disengagement that operates in accordance with driving conditions. The rear motors serve as the car's primary power source, while the front EDU disengages during coasting and low-speed cruising to optimize efficiency. A unique, but aerodynamic face From the pictures, the CONCEPT AMG GT XX is a striking sports car design that combines a few unique design languages to turn heads with its fastback shape, low hood, and sleek windshield, all highlighted by a vibrant sunset beam orange finish. From the front, the GT XX features a flat and wide profile signature and distinctive Mercedes design cues like its oversized grille with an integrated Mercedes star, as well as motorsport-inspired details, like air outlets in the hood to optimize airflow and a prominent front splitter that enhances aerodynamics. The side profile looks eerily similar to Xiaomi's SU7 from certain angles, and the rear is defined by a triple set of circular taillamps, a wide carbon diffuser, and an active airbrake. Source: Mercedes-Benz The Concept AMG GT XX even has speakers in its headlights, which pump out ambient driving sounds to keep pedestrians aware of its presence and enhance the driving experience. Despite its funny looks, AMG says that the GT XX is very aerodynamic. It claims a drag coefficient of 0.198, which makes it more aerodynamic than the limited edition AMG ONE and Tesla Model S, and is close to other contemporary EVs like the Xiaomi SU7 and the Lucid Air. AMG claims that the secret to the magic number is aerodynamic retractable wheel covers. These covers consist of five carbon-fiber panels that form a star shape and move outward and retract electrically as needed for brake cooling or optimal airflow. Inside, the AMG GT XX features carbon fiber bucket seats with racing harnesses and custom cushioning that can be made from a customer's body scan for optimum bolstering. To keep with the theme of efficiency, the textiles used in the interior are made with worn GT3 race tires, while hints of orange add a pop of color to the otherwise dark cabin. Like with most EVs, a large dual-tablet display is the centrepiece in front of the driver, and an F1-style yoke steering wheel with twistable selectors and paddle shifters adds more racing flair. Final thoughts Mercedes-AMG has not released any details on when a production version of the AMG GT XX will be released, but it is expected that many of the details will be incorporated into the final version for series production. In its statement about the car, Mercedes-AMG CEO Michael Schiebe defended that the car 'is a true AMG with every fiber of its being,' adding that 'the heart of an AMG was always the motor, and that will remain so with our in-house electric architecture.' Though it may be a tough sell to AMG loyalists, the Concept GT XX shows that Affalterbach is primed and ready to play ball in any game it can get in on, even if it includes electrons. About the Author James Ochoa View Profile
