What happened to Michelle Mone's Dubai bitcoin property empire?
Mone, who was made a peer in 2015 for services to business, announced proposals to build two 40-floor skyscrapers complete with shopping centre and sports facilities.
With her husband, Doug Barrowman, Mone announced in 2017 that the properties would be available to buy for virtual currency rather than cash.
However, work on the site has been abandoned, despite claims from Mone and Barrowman that buyers had already invested in flats using cryptocurrency.
'I'm a baroness so I wouldn't be getting involved in it if it was a kind of 'dodgy' industry,' Monetold an American news network at the time.
Yet, the Mail on Sunday reports, Dubai government records show that the couple's Aston Plaza and Residences, located in the Science Park district of the city, were never built. A property inspection report carried out by the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency confirmed that the project started but was later 'cancelled' at just 32 per cent completion.
Pictures taken by inspectors who visited the site in January 2018 show the concrete shell of one tower abandoned in the middle of the desert. Promotional mock-ups on the project's website showed sleek, minimalist homes set across two glass tower blocks.
According to the development's website, 150 apartments were available to buy directly from the developers using bitcoin, a digital currency.
It added: 'The highly anticipated selection of 1,133 studio, one and two bedroom apartments, is due for completion in summer 2019. Apartments offer floor-to-ceiling windows with unobstructed views of the Dubai Hills and the iconic city skyline.'
The project was sold on to a Dubai-based developer.
Representatives for Mone and Barrowman said that no one lost any money and all deposits were held in escrow, in accordance with the law in Dubai.
In the UK the Scottish business couple are at the centre of an anti-corruption inquiry connected to the coronavirus pandemic which has led to £75 million of their assets being frozen by the National Crime Agency.
Investigators are focused on PPE Medpro, a company led by Barrowman, which was placed in a VIP priority lane for government personal protective equipment contracts worth £203 million of taxpayers' money after a recommendation by Mone.
The Department of Health and Social Care is suing PPE Medpro over claims that surgical gowns supplied by the firm were not fit for use. The government told the High Court in London recently that the company should pay back more than £121 million for breaching a Covid contract for 25 million of the gowns.
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The kula system is grounded in a non-monetary system of honor, prestige and reciprocity, which helps us understand Trump's tariff strategy but does not fit his narcissist drive to crush all his fellow players. Even the kula system is about relationships. Trump is strictly about winning deals. So we must beware of seeing the urge to dominate all prestige markets as Trump's bottom line. Trump's bottom line is money. Being an avaricious man, Trump worships money – both its power and its pomp – and he seeks it through his extensive networks of children, clients, tax lawyers and cronies, all devoted to the increase of his wealth. This pecuniary drive has a transcendent, epic and unquenchable force which cannot be explained by reference to the other things that money can buy. Even his quest for prestige through arm-twisting tariff deals is primarily about positioning himself to secure future deals in his individual capacity. His is a special brand of avarice. There is no better way to explore the ways in which Trump's various egonomic strategies come together than in the recent invention and propagation of cryptocurrency, which has spawned a shadow world of speculators, fraudsters, legal hucksters, elected and unelected lobbyists. Their usual victims are vulnerable citizens, low-level grifters, pensioners, badly informed investors and other natural prey. The entire industry lives in a gray economy, attached to mainstream markets, assets and regulators like the tiny remora fish that feast off sharks. It survives in a legal twilight zone, where its currency is accepted only by some businesses as legal tender, and where smart players use pump-and-dump tactics to make fast profits with short-lived 'coins' of various kinds. Whatever the utility of cryptocurrency in the real world of goods and services, it is mainly a tool for amassing wealth by gambling on its future convertibility to real money in specialized currency exchanges. Cryptocurrency puts Trump in the position of being a player and the owner of a casino-like system at the same time, so that he always wins, if not in one role, then in the other. The outrageous self-enrichment schemes of Trump and his family in the crypto industry, which have been carefully exposed in several media outlets recently, establish new frontiers for Trump's shameless violation of even the simplest norms about conflict of interest. The best example of these ventures is his memecoin, $Trump, which has made him and his close associates a fortune by selling access to Trump through a barely regulated crypto mechanism. By some estimates, Trump has gained several billions of dollars in his net worth through his crypto ventures, which combine nepotism, influence-peddling and dealmaking in a unique package. Through cryptocurrency, Trump has found the ultimate way to attach his core impulse – avarice – to the larger machinery of the markets. There is some truth to the argument that Trump wants more of everything he can get, including power, glory and prestige. But what he wants more than anything else is money, which is just a temporary token of more money, and more money for ever more. The unique instinct behind Trump's avarice, which sets him apart from other billionaires who continue to chase wealth, is that he has found a way to build his fortune through deals – whether deals that make him money by inflating the value of his brand, which can then make him more money through more deals, or through the enforceability of completed contracts. Through his dealmaking, Trump has managed to triumph over the market, making it work for him to amass greater and greater sums of money, whether his deals are seen through to fruition or not. We can summarize Trump's approach to markets by adapting a famous sentence, spoken by him, about how he grabs women: Trump grabs markets by the deal. Illustrations by Joao Fazenda
