This programme contains some strong language
The reality is that nothing is one dimensional.
On 10th April 2019,
the aircraft I was in, British Airways,
landed from Islamabad, Pakistan.
I'd been doing that flight pretty much every week
for the last maybe six months.
An announcement that I'd heard many times in aircraft before
was made on the plane, which was, "Everybody please remain seated
"because the police want to come on board."
I didn't give it a second thought.
As soon as I got off the plane, on the gangway,
there was another gentleman.
This one was dressed in a police uniform, and he said,
"Sir, I'm placing you under arrest under an extradition warrant
"from the United States, and you need to come with us."
Naqvi is also now waiting on a possible extradition to the US
in order to face the charges, which include the likes
of securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy,
according to court documents.
This is a major development in this saga
that has been ongoing for some time.
It's not about an explanation.
It's not about redemption.
It's not about justification or even seeking sympathy.
One minute I was welcomed by the global elite,
my opinions seemingly sought by so many world leaders,
the next moment, here I am.
It's a very different Arif from the Arif you folks knew.
But it is still...
..somewhere there.
Arif Naqvi had to be an astonishingly clever man,
otherwise he couldn't remotely have done this.
He was very ambitious, which is what you want,
and he wanted to make money, which is what you want.
The biggest private equity group in the Middle East is Abraaj Capital.
Chairman and CEO, Arif Naqvi...
People were looking at Abraaj as a success - a $14 billion success.
The pitch that Arif was making was that he could make investors rich
and end poverty.
You're not just there to make money
but you're actually there to achieve good.
You cannot forget where you put $240 million.
You became suspicious of everything and everyone.
We were starting to text each other and call each other,
literally going, "What the BLEEP?!"
The more money he made, the more successful he got,
the more he contributed towards the society.
Potential unauthorised drawings of 300 million plus
I still find substantially astounding.
It was...a machine
designed to defraud people.
I am crystal clear in front of my Maker
that I have never committed an intentional act of criminality.
I was the piano player who played the month of January in Davos.
This was my 27th World Economic Forum,
so I've met a lot of people.
Many prime ministers, my gosh.
There's a lot of things going on in the daytime -
discussions, conferences.
I don't get to see any of that.
The main party was the piano bar.
My job is to make them happy,
get them drunk and forget about life.
I didn't know who Arif was at first.
He came back every night, and it was when he slipped
a nice big money bill into my hand that I realised,
OK, I have to get to know this guy.
Right? It isn't every day you get a 500 euro tip.
On my far left, Arif Naqvi, the founder and group CEO
of Abraaj Capital in the UAE.
I've been a financial journalist for 22 years.
Davos, which is this confluence of capitalists and politicians
who, in public, talk about making the world a better place,
and then in closed doors they're often doing deals.
Arif was really in his element,
talking with other money managers in public, on stage.
You're an enormous investor...
Because these markets have got liquidity, they've got strength,
they're going to make up for lost time.
Arif spoke the language of Western finance, but also understood
the realities of countries where people lived on very low incomes.
The vision that drove Abraaj to become a global force
is harnessing Western-style capitalism
to help achieve stability and better health and equality and prosperity
in regions that are defined...
..by poverty and volatility.
The pitch that Arif was making was that he could make investors rich
and end poverty.
This was impact investing, and I was its flag-carrier.
He used to like to sit on the window ledge behind me.
He just sat there drinking his scotch, enjoying the music.
And I noticed he was wearing a white badge,
which means you have access to everything,
and obviously you're a CEO or a prime minister
or somebody that can afford the - what is it? - the $50,000 fee?
As the night progressed, he would loosen up a bit, of course.
The next thing you know, he's got a microphone,
singing Hotel California with me. Yeah, I mean, he's human, too.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I turned up in Dubai with nothing.
It was a city that was extremely good to me.
In the 2000s, between 2000 and 2008, you put a dollar in anything,
you know tomorrow it's two dollars, but then who makes sure that
actually it's six dollars? So, Arif was the six dollar man.
It was the only environment in the Middle East
where you could effectively create a name through entrepreneurship.
I set up businesses myself.
It was innovative, it was fun, and we were earning money.
Well, I got involved with it because I saw a very talented deal-maker.
He was very ambitious, which is what you want,
and he wanted to make money, which is what you want.
He was very clever at flattering people
and selling them a great story.
Aramex was a transaction he had identified.
Aramex is a courier company
sometimes called the FedEx of the Middle East.
Yes, it was a Middle Eastern company,
but it was listed on Nasdaq.
We announced that acquisition very late in 2001.
Post 9/11, obviously we were diligenced to death by all parties -
an Arab company buying an Arab company off the stock exchange.
I mean, look, private equity was fashionable.
A private equity fund ought to conduct itself by taking money
from investors, then deploying it
into investments,
like acquiring a stake in a company
which will be improved
to generate returns, and then
sharing these profits with investors
when the company is sold.
The weakness in private equity is the lack of transparency.
You have to have a higher element of trust
in the person or the organisation.
I kept a very close eye on everything.
I was overly anxious about his behaviour.
We had one member of the Saudi royal family
who was a shareholder in our firm.
Now, the Saudi royal family is a very big family,
there are thousands of members, and then I caught him claiming
to say that we represent the Saudi royal family,
and those sort of things got me very nervous.
Ali and I never got on with each other.
I found him to be a volatile keg and a difficult person to work with.
Well, I think I pushed for the divorce
because, at the end of the day, it was untenable.
We separated from Ali very shortly thereafter, and Abraaj was born.
Abraaj is towers.
So, Burj is one tower,
Abraaj is towers.
The choice of the name was smart. It was very Arabic,
although now it's global.
Arif also liked what Abraaj meant in Hindi or Urdu.
Now we rule.
Now it's our time to be in charge.
Those years were very, very important years
and the deals...then the big deals started happening.
When Abraaj sold its shares in Aramex in 2005,
they made something like five times their money.
That success attracted a lot of attention to Arif and to Abraaj.
He started getting into the message, which was do good and make money,
and that became his theme.
Karachi is one of the most congested cities on this planet.
Around 2008, power outages were routine.
When there is a power outage,
it means complete misery for very ordinary people.
Life would completely come to a grinding halt.
Karachi Electric was associated with that darkness.
There was violence.
There were riots.
It was a very, very volatile place.
Karachi Electric, with all its problems, was an opportunity
for Arif and his colleagues to prove that they could bring about
a real transformation of a company
that would bring tangible, positive benefits to customers and citizens.
Is it doable? Of course it's doable.
It was a very good deal. People were jealous.
It was the biggest foreign investment in Pakistan
and, over the years, we found that Karachi Electric
actually ran far more efficiently than the government was doing.
I met Arif off and on in these days.
The more money he made,
he made sure that people in Pakistan benefited from it.
My mantra of doing good is not just about giving money away.
It's about having the direct impact.
He set up this Aman Foundation
and this Aman Foundation did a lot of charitable work in Pakistan.
They set up this ambulance service in various parts of the country.
Over the last decade, Aman has probably saved over a million lives.
I know that for a fact.
I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning
between the United States and Muslims around the world.
In 2009, President Obama went to Cairo to reset the relationship
between the United States and the Islamic world,
which had been torn apart by the September 11th 2001 attacks.
Now, we know that military power alone is not going to solve
the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That's why we plan to invest $1.5 billion
each year over the next five years.
APPLAUSE
After that speech, the US sought out partners in the Middle East
with which a government fund could invest.
One of the companies which stepped forward was Abraaj.
The US Government pledged $150 million to an Abraaj fund
to invest in Middle Eastern companies.
Well, the biggest private equity group in the Middle East
and North Africa today launched a Palestine investment fund.
Here now to talk about that and what's going on with Dubai
in the Middle East is Abraaj Capital chairman and CEO, Arif Naqvi.
Securing funding from the United States Government
was a big moment for Abraaj and for Arif.
When you go through all the media hype about Arif at the time,
it was all about do good and make money.
How are you going to make this more than just a nice headline?
So I think what it should be lauded as is a new initiative
to create opportunity, because when people trade with each other,
they forget about violence and negativity.
The Americans saw him as someone who could be an important partner.
These are the big players from the US.
He did sit with these guys in forums and meetings
and everything else, and I think it drags you...
The more you do, the more you want from that.
They were part of the same movement -
this belief that investment capital can help end poverty.
Five years ago or so, Arif Naqvi, who was from Karachi,
bought this property,
he turned this wonderful green behind us into a cricket ground,
and then he got in touch with all his old muckers,
entertained them lavishly, and sent them to play cricket
and to make fools of themselves.
I'm quite certain this year, we've got charities involved
and things like that, it's going to be even better.
Well, my name is Henry Blofeld and I've spent 47 years
commentating about cricket for the BBC.
A television producer rang me up and he said,
"Would you consider commentating for me at a ground near Oxford?
"There is this extraordinary rich Pakistani called Arif Naqvi.
"He'd probably pay you quite a lot of money."
That's gone all the way!
Goodness knows how many technicians there were there,
and, to my astonishment, was going to be shown nowhere,
so, I mean, this was a great demonstration of extravagance.
Here we are, a mutual celebration.
The camera can't drink but Farokh and I can.
And Imran Khan comes on to bowl.
So this is really the witching hour.
I've known Arif Naqvi for almost 25 years
and I certainly consider him a friend.
At the end of my cricketing days, I met him
and he was one of those few staunch cricket lovers.
Arif was very pleased.
He was enormously pleased that Imran was dignifying his cricket ground.
That will have done Arif Naqvi's street cred hugely good.
Arif...
Arif as a cricketer was not as good as his business acumen.
And the boss has been run out.
Oh, dear.
He invited me because he also invited top Pakistani businessmen.
After the match, we had a small dinner, a fundraising dinner,
and that dinner was to raise money for my political party.
Here were these people with huge amounts of money, and the principal
was Arif Naqvi, who had got more money than any of them.
When I look at my life story
and I think, with all of that going for you, Arif,
and with, erm...
..money that I earned that was way beyond my wildest expectations,
and I felt that there must be a purpose to my life other than...
..generating the amounts of money that I did.
Arif Naqvi was a very focused man.
When I started running Unilever, you get exposed to hundreds of people
and at that time he was one of them.
He was a big advocate for a few things
that I think we all believe in and still do.
First and foremost, that you need to channel more of our world's capital
to the right things - ie, making this a better world.
This movement of people and institutions
which was seeking to channel investment funds in a way that
it ended poverty as well as making a profit
came to be known as impact investing.
I've been in the impact investing industry all my life.
I'm doing what I love doing,
which is investing and actually making a difference.
I worked for a London firm named Aureos,
which invested in the developing world.
We were a boots-on-the-ground model and that's what many investors,
pension funds, sovereign wealth funds,
a couple of US foundations, loved about the Aureos model.
Abraaj bought Aureos.
Arif and his colleagues recognised that owning Aureos
would open the doors to these Western government funds for Abraaj.
Having international investors, and a whole bunch of them,
makes a big difference.
Abraaj was primarily the Gulf, Middle East, North Africa.
We were in Latin America, we were in Sub-Saharan Africa,
we were in Asia.
So the Middle East's largest private equity firm, Abraaj Capital,
continues to expand.
The Dubai-based company has bought the UK specialist fund
Aureos Capital, which has around $1.3 billion under management.
The combined entity will manage $7.5 billion-worth of assets
and that's across 30 countries.
For Abraaj, the acquisition of Aureos
meant that sort of at one click of a switch,
you had a whole investor base
which could normally take years to actually build up.
And I joined the board of the UN Global Compact
when Arif Naqvi was on the board.
That's probably where I got to know him a little bit better.
Did he stand out in one way or another?
The world tends to be in monologue between us Westerners.
He was an advocate, very much so, for impact investing
for the emerging markets.
The sheer force of development
is what will make these markets grow.
And it's extremely exciting to be a part of that right now.
Arif became very adept in pitching
Abraaj as a firm who could
gather money from the richer parts of the world
and invest in poorer parts of the world in a way that would
make a profit and a positive impact as well.
You cannot think of a forum that he or his people weren't there,
or you cannot think of a prize that wasn't awarded to them.
When I got to Dubai, the Abraaj headquarters,
my first impression was, you could fit all the Aureos offices
in this one office.
The whole structure around Arif was almost like a president's office.
Some seniors, as well as a lot of junior people,
who were very loyal to Arif.
One of these individuals was having a haircut
and he got a call from Arif.
He actually left the hairdresser's and went back to the office
with half a haircut.
When you're asked, "Jump,"
they asked, "How high?"
The Gates Foundation believes that all lives have equal value.
At the Gates Foundation, I managed the Strategic Investment Fund,
designed to partner with for-profit companies and investment funds
around the world, with the goal of alleviating poverty and ensuring
proper healthcare treatment for populations around the globe.
The first time that we know Arif met Bill Gates
was when he hosted him at a dinner at his house.
He puts on a very grand meeting for Bill and other luminaries.
Bill Gates.
It's... It's great.
The buzz had skyrocketed itself.
Bill Gates and Arif Naqvi agreed to do something in healthcare.
It was a very large investment and it was important to us.
It was probably a very proud moment for Arif to be able to say that,
look, we've got this fund going and it's a few years after,
you know, discussing this with Bill Gates and so on, and we're there.
I'm from the emerging markets.
I've always invested in the emerging markets for the last 25 years.
I'm managing director and head of private equity funds
at British International Investment,
the UK Government's Development Finance Institution.
The Abraaj team, probably the investor relations team,
came to us to say, "We have this great idea of a fund
"looking at affordable healthcare," and having Gates there
gave us a lot of comfort in terms of, you know,
impact will definitely be driving some of that agenda.
Abraaj's healthcare fund was made up of heavyweight investors.
The Gates Foundation, the UK Government's investment arm,
as well as the French Government equivalent,
put in almost $200 million between them.
In addition, the US Government's Overseas Investment Corporation
and the World Bank's private sector development arm committed in total
around $250 million.
All in all, when combined with other investors, we had $1 billion
to make healthcare investments around the world.
Once a year, there would be a formal Investor Week,
where investors across all of their funds would come together.
Arif had a very prominent role.
Beyond the human suffering on the ground that affects
each and every one of us...
There was always a session around his charity -
the Aman Foundation, and the importance of why it's not
just about making money - that it also needs to ultimately do good.
Whenever I saw him speak about that, I felt he really believed that.
He was being genuine with his audience.
The teams would get together from all around the world.
The whole point is to mingle and to meet each other.
You had music going on in the evenings.
There would be pretty lively events.
The firm wasn't one of the largest in the world, but the lifestyle
and the characters that led it certainly were larger than life.
I remember a specific incident when one of the teams
was talking to us about a very aggressive business plan,
so I kept kind of drilling on that.
And eventually, you know, it was time for a break.
We stepped out and Arif came to me, I recall,
and he said, "You know, Clarisa, you ask a lot of questions."
And I said, "Yes, I do. That's part of my job."
He said, "No, but you're asking too many questions."
You know, individuals will be charming and convincing
and individuals will try to be intimidating.
That doesn't work.
You can try both.
Arif tried that on me.
That didn't work.
My former colleagues had concerns with the professionalism
of the Abraaj team and were very interested when I met with them
in finding the nicest restaurant in Seattle
and ordering several-hundred-dollar bottles of wine.
That's what they were focused on.
We at Abraaj, I at Abraaj, we were not bad people.
We were never bad people.
We wanted to change the world and we were trying to do that.
HENRY BLOFELD: There was one time when I was staying in Dubai,
Blair and I were asked to dinner by Arif Naqvi
at his house at Emirates Hills.
We had an amazing evening.
We must have been 30 to dinner at least.
I mean, the wine, we didn't drink Chateau Petrus,
which he produced, I think, at many of his parties.
He wanted all the time to impress and go one up, if he could,
on all his friends, and I think his house in Emirates Hills
was very much a part of his one-upmanship.
Emirates Hills is a place populated by the billionaires of the world.
In the middle of Emirates Hills, he built a huge mosque,
a huge complex named after his father, Masood Naqvi.
That Islamic centre means a lot to the local community.
You will see billionaires rubbing shoulders with the workers
who work in these houses of billionaires.
It was accepted that he had a yacht
and that he flew everywhere by private jet.
Again, I mean, my inner...
I thought, "Well, there's Arif showing that he's a very rich man."
The reality is that the finances of Abraaj are in a dangerous state.
The firm was most definitely spending more than it was earning.
I joined, I think, on 26th Jan 2016.
As I went into the grinding machine,
it was quite interesting, I must say.
One of my mandates was to control costs, resize the organisation.
He used to tell me, "Listen, my problem is I'm too generous.
"We have a huge set-up. Maybe we can do with less. I don't know.
"But I need someone who, you know... Merciless, you know?
"I'd like you to...
"And, you know, it's known that I do what needs to be done, OK?"
We had the highest headcount of investment staff
per dollar under management in the world.
The firm has gone into marketing overdrive
and the message that's being put out publicly is one of success,
of having a great track record,
of being in partnership with Bill Gates and the likes.
You go to World Economic Forum meetings,
we had presence bigger than...
..you know, can I say Goldman Sachs, for example?
You know, bigger than global investment banks.
I believe in investing in presents, but it was too excessive.
A very small group of people, maybe four, five, six,
at the heart of Abraaj knew the extent of a Abraaj's problems.
The most important one was the book-keeper...
..who is Rafique.
Abraaj's finance department is managed
by a man called Rafique Lakhani.
His office was filled with paper receipts.
Rafique was a tireless employee of Arif.
Extremely loyal.
Same for Waqar Siddique,
who is Arif's brother-in-law and a senior executive.
To keep the firm from failing,
Rafique and Arif were moving money around.
Two people who know the most were Waqar and Rafique.
Rafique, under Arif's guidance, was moving money
out of the healthcare fund and then using that
to pay for various costs elsewhere in Abraaj.
It was a juggling act.
So the way funds work is the fund manager, in this case Abraaj,
will say, "We're about to make an investment in this hospital network.
"We need $50 million to make that investment."
The money is actually drawn down, as it's called, from the investors
slowly over time, little by little over time.
What was unique about the Abraaj fund is they very quickly said,
"We need several hundred million dollars."
There was a small drawdown made in September of 2016,
but then in December 2016,
there was a drawdown for almost $400 million.
So at first we thought that was a good sign.
It was an indication that they had done their homework
and had a large number of deals that were ready to move quickly.
However, after just a few months, we realised that they were
drawing down much more money
than they were actually using to invest.
Something is wrong here. Something makes no sense.
So when March came,
they said, "This is the update on the overall portfolio."
And we said, "There's still some money that hasn't been drawn.
"You should be using that or giving it back to investors."
They said, "No, it's going to be utilised in the very short term
"and we're actually going to be asking for more money
"from you tomorrow in the order of $115 million."
And we said, "Well, you've had more than that already in cash."
Very quickly you realised that you needed to ask many more questions
because...
..the answers weren't fully making sense.
I was invited by Arif to do this Art Dubai.
We were guests at the Ritz-Carlton.
I had a chauffeur with a Mercedes 500 come to pick me up.
And Art Dubai was not far from that famous hotel that looks like a sail.
It was a major event.
One of the biggest fixtures of the Dubai social scene.
The whole mood was just very sombre.
Arif was very quiet.
He shook a few hands. He didn't stay long.
And for the first time, he did not even
come over to say hello to me.
Something big is happening.
I don't know what it is but I didn't like it.
There was a lot happening in the background,
which later I got to realise, the pressure -
one, from the healthcare investors. "Where is the cash?
"Why are you sitting on so much cash?"
So I started emailing and calling the fund managers repeatedly.
After several weeks of back and forth, they said,
"Because we trust you, Andrew, and because of our close relationship
"with the Gates Foundation, this one time we will tell you
"where the money is - which bank account it's in."
And they sent me a audit statement showing that that $200 million
was sitting in the Commercial Bank of Dubai.
That interaction got me more and more concerned.
In September 2017,
just organising the investor meeting for October.
You normally have the investors by conference call.
And so, on that call, it was a different set of people
than I had been interacting with previously
when they told me it was in the Commercial Bank of Dubai,
so I thought, "I'm just going to ask again - where is the money sitting?"
The financial controller gave an answer.
A particular bank.
"Oh, don't worry about it. It's in Standard Bank."
I remember there was sort of silence for a few seconds
and then, on the phone,
"That's not the information or the bank account I got."
And all of a sudden it was like, "What?" You know, "What's going on?"
And at that point, my head exploded.
You cannot forget where you put $240 million.
A formal letter was sent - Gates, on behalf of the investors
from the committee, saying, "You have until the end of the year
"to return our capital, to show us a bank statement."
The response was not good.
At that point, Arif reached out to everyone
who managed the fund's boss within their organisations.
This over-the-top explosion, trying to get everyone fired,
that's an indication that something is very, very wrong.
Asking for a bank statement is not an outrageous request.
Abraaj and Arif personally appeared to take that as a lack of trust.
And that's when I really knew for the first time
that we likely had a case of fraud.
The Prime Minister is not a job I aspired to,
but it's a big responsibility.
So, I took office on August 1st 2017
and completed my constitutional term of ten months.
Naqvi asked to meet me in relation to the issues of K-Electric.
I felt that it was very important to him.
A successful sale of Karachi Electric would have brought
hundreds of millions of dollars.
He raised emphasis on the fact that this was critical
for Abraaj and him.
He was bringing in Shanghai Electric,
which was the premier power utility in the world.
It was something that I felt, as the Prime Minister,
was important for Pakistan, so I was trying to facilitate
the transaction to take place.
In fact, I asked my military secretary
to allow him full access to me and my office.
It was the single largest Chinese investment into Pakistan,
so there is a geopolitical situation.
For a huge city's electricity and power to go into the Chinese hands,
it's not what it was like by the Americans.
And you always find out about these issues
about a quarter of a century later, when the documents are declassified.
A whole host of issues. We resolved many of them,
but we could not finalise that transaction.
Perhaps Abraaj, with the extra money,
would have been in a better situation.
We can only speculate on that.
In September 2017, Arif travelled to New York.
He gives a very big speech about impact investing
at a conference which is timed to coincide
with the UN General Assembly,
so he's in town with the great and the good.
World leaders, CEOs, billionaires.
You cannot create a great company
unless you start with a good company.
And a good company is one that stands for what society stands for.
He was speaking at a time
when something seriously wrong was happening at Abraaj.
All of us are looking to make a difference,
hopefully in the lives of anywhere upwards of
200 to 300 million people.
Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
This is not the way to end global poverty,
by telling investors one thing and citizens one thing
and then doing something else.
The foundation started receiving whistle-blower emails
from an email, WB Abraaj at Gmail, or whatever it was,
which stood for Whistle-blower Abraaj...
..basically saying, you're on the right track,
you're figuring things out.
You and the other investors, keep digging.
I was told by Dubai HQ that any more interaction with investors
is to be dealt with by a small group of people,
of which I'm not one of them.
And at that point, I went to the management of the Gates Foundation
and said, "We have a major problem. We need to dig into it."
Abraaj sent us yet another statement for one day
showing that the $200 million was sitting in the account on that day,
December 7th, or whatever it was, 2017.
You became suspicious of everything and everyone.
We were suspecting that what they were doing is,
when they needed to show that money was there,
they would transfer money in for one day, print out a bank statement,
and then transfer it out to use it for other purposes.
At the end of December 2017, the limited partners
of the healthcare fund received their monies back.
In January, they said, "We've already given you your money."
But the trust had been broken from our side.
We're going to hire forensic accountants who are going to
look at every record of the money coming in and out.
By that point, we had no certainty of where that money had been.
I woke up mid-January,
checked my emails as I did every single morning,
I had one potentially interesting email from an anonymous address -
WB Abraaj. So I responded to that.
I said, "Hello. Thank you for sharing this information with me.
"Can you please tell me who you are and why you've shared this with me?"
Will was a colleague of mine at the Wall Street Journal at the time.
He came over to me one day and told me that he'd received this email.
I'd often wondered where Abraaj
got the money to fund the conspicuous events and lifestyle
that its senior executives seemed to lead.
But my main feeling initially was not,
oh, this must be true or this must be false.
My main priority at that time is to find out - is it true or not?
So they said, for instance, that Abraaj had asked investors
for $200 million, which hadn't been spent
and had been used to pay salaries instead.
If this were true, I mean, this would have been Abraaj
committing a kind of cardinal sin of fund management.
So the money in private equity is supposed to be managed
in a very disciplined way.
If you raise a healthcare fund, you can't, you know,
go and throw a party with that money or pay someone's salary or bonus.
I mean, this is where trust is won or lost in finance.
So we started to gather pieces of information.
Off-the-record comments.
Documents followed.
We kept calling people, calling them back,
calling Abraaj.
How am I ever going to confirm without getting bank statements
and investor reports, which are very difficult to get
because they're confidential?
While we're doing the reporting,
trying to verify the information in the anonymous email,
Arif is in Davos.
I knew that someone was briefing against us in the press,
and that was a coordinated exercise, but I had no idea who or what.
Arif had arranged a meeting with two very senior executives
at News Corp.
He tried really hard to get them to kill our story.
And he actually participates in a panel discussion
with Bill Gates about global health.
Like Bill, I'm an optimist.
And I have to say that Bill was instrumental.
That Bill is so focused.
So, you know, probably, as Bill will testify...
Arif repeatedly tries to engage Bill Gates in...in conversation.
It's apparent that Bill Gates is trying quite hard
to not be engaged by Arif in conversation.
Can I just add something slightly provocative there, Bill,
and, I don't know, maybe I'm being a bit simplistic,
but these gold standard regulators and the drugs that are approved...
And even for Arif to appear... If you're a fund manager
and you're under investigation, to be able to get up on stage
and then lecture one of the world's richest men
really takes a lot of, erm...
I'm not quite sure... What, confidence maybe? Courage?
We called Abraaj for comment.
A senior executive said it's not true
that hundreds of millions of dollars are missing.
Abraaj is regulated in seven jurisdictions.
It has the highest governance standards.
At that point, we knew investors were investigating,
so we published the article on February 2nd 2018.
When the two infamous articles came out,
I got a call from Waqar saying,
"Bisher, you know, there are two...
"..American, quote unquote, publications,
"They're after us, those bloody racist, erm...
"..newspapers. They want to nail our successes."
And then it was like an avalanche.
After the articles came out,
we were starting to text each other and call each other
and literally going, "What the fuck?" I mean, "What's going on?"
It shouldn't happen in our business.
Drawing down and sitting on the money for a while,
fine, you could live with it.
But using it for another purpose?
That's not OK.
And this is exactly what I told Arif, I remember.
"This is called a serious violation which needs a major change."
He goes, "What do you mean?
"Some heads have to roll,
"including, potentially, yours."
He kept on climbing down the stairs, snooping around all of us,
trying to figure out what's going on.
I built a wall...
..to block the staircase.
Gypsum wall. You bring gypsum...
Not me, physically.
I was constantly reaching out to Abraaj's spokesperson
and senior executives and to Arif.
Everything that I said
was being ignored.
I sent letters and responses in writing. I sent them verbally.
Will and I had a phone call with Arif.
We spoke for hours. I can't remember exactly how long.
The answers he gave to the questions we asked were not sufficient
to make us say, "OK, well, there's nothing to see here."
Simon and I just...
What do we...? We literally got nothing out of that.
He just spoke in kind of very abstract language.
We thought that if we could meet him in person, then maybe,
you know, you'd have a bit more engagement.
He initially was talking about, yes, he would meet me
to talk things through, but that meeting never happened.
I only stopped when I realised that it didn't really matter.
It continued to be a one-sided narrative.
As you can imagine, a lot of the time in the office
was spent discussing what was really going on.
So I guess I first got really immersed in the Abraaj data
back in early 2018
on behalf of the Dubai Financial Services Authority -
the local Dubai regulator.
The data for the regulator is still downloading in the mailboxes
and this partner appears in my office.
It felt like he was shouting blue murder, saying,
"You must stop now. Stop what you're doing now.
"Arif doesn't want anybody else to see his information."
Then the news on Fund IV comes up.
But, again, investors are asking,
"Where is the money? Where is the money?"
The money was not there.
So the guy says, "So what is this?"
The potential...
..unauthorised drawings of 300 million plus
to Arif-controlled vehicles
I still find substantially astounding.
So, I'm an auditor by training.
I remember, literally, my jaw dropped
when the guys showed me the download from Arif's ledger.
It's not only of the quantity of money that was withdrawn
but also from the level of details.
From a shoeshine of 20 drams,
all the way to the transfers to him or his companies
of tens of millions of dollars.
I have never stolen money from anyone.
Transfers would be made to the same vehicle controlled by Arif -
a company called Silverline Holdings,
sometimes frequently in the same week.
Money was being taken in and used for these corporate expenses
and for personal gain when it was so tight.
Right? So tight. And investor money couldn't be given back
or investments couldn't be made.
That's fundamentally what I still find, I guess,
the most shocking about the Abraaj story.
There was a hole to be filled of around $200 million.
The money that plugged the hole for the healthcare fund
came from Air Arabia.
Arif was on the board of that company as well.
An arrangement was struck with Air Arabia
to place a short-term deposit with Abraaj.
200 million was taken in.
And our audited report said we had the money.
It was then transferred directly from the fund bank account
back to Air Arabia.
In accounting and auditing standards,
this is what we call typically window-dressing, right?
You dress the window for a certain occasion
and then you strip it down.
And I met with the auditors.
And they are KPMG, just to make things clear.
I told them, in my book or in anyone's book,
this is gross negligence.
It was a machine...
..designed to defraud people.
Who designed that machine?
Who do you think? I mean...
He borrowed money from airlines, banks, people.
One of the lenders, they said, "We want our money back."
So Arif's yacht is put up for sale.
Various properties he owns.
Creditors wanted to be repaid.
Abraaj couldn't repay them, so that's what triggered Abraaj
having to file for provisional liquidation.
We'd grown fast, yeah, but we were destroyed even faster.
Anonymous emails, negative news articles,
they forced us into a civil liquidation process.
The only thing you have in a business
in the world of finance is your reputation.
When that's gone, nothing else can really survive.
The corporate response was, nothing to see here.
No involvement or fraud from either Arif or a wider Abraaj perspective.
I'm spending most of my time on this story.
What has happened here is not public.
No-one ever found out who sent those anonymous emails,
so we were looking for sources that could verify what the emails said.
Simon found a new source who might have bank statements.
And I've probably reviewed 80%, 85% of the records that exist
for thousands of hours.
Immersed in looking at the data and finding new things what felt daily,
I was very fearful of speaking to anybody in the media.
I remember literally trembling.
The atmosphere was very tense because there was a lot at stake.
You had to put in quite a lot of work
for the first half an hour to calm me down.
I remember you consistently asking me,
"Can I have a copy of that? Can I have a copy of that?"
There had been lots of rumour and hearsay,
that's one thing, but actually seeing the evidence
is something else altogether.
I wouldn't say that I slept properly again for...
..a good year or two.
All this information went into the investigative feature.
That meeting that Simon had with his source was crucial.
I think that really elevates the story from being a badly run company
to someone taking lots of money that you're not necessarily entitled to.
Yes, private equity can help solve some of humanity's biggest problems.
But in the Abraaj story, I was presented with a lot of evidence
that it wasn't solving problems, it was making problems.
We had written the story in October 2018 and nothing had happened.
We're hearing various rumours about Arif being in Pakistan
meeting with Imran Khan.
I was Prime Minister then.
I began to realise that there were some problems taking place
and I, of course, heard about these problems from Arif's point of view.
Is this how finance works?
Someone can basically just allegedly take a lot of money
and then nothing happens to them?
We didn't know that the US Department of Justice
was preparing to pounce.
We got the shock of our lives when we found
that he had been arrested at Heathrow.
I was shocked with the US response.
The charges add up to 291 years in jail.
The US Government did not want him to be granted bail.
His initial requests were rejected
until he offered £15 million,
which at the time was the highest bail bond
ever requested and granted.
With the benefit of hindsight,
one always has 20/20 vision, right?
Would you do some things differently? Of course you would.
Would you have different people around you? Of course you would.
But to be told that I masterminded a criminal conspiracy
and enterprise, that's just wrong,
and I categorically claim my innocence from those charges.
I think criminal intent
is the most difficult thing to prove in a court of law.
I'm still hoping, as I say, that Arif has a last deal in him.
He is a deal-maker and I hope he does it.
Since lawyers want to keep the whole truth part for a legal podium,
but it'll certainly come out and certainly come out over time.
At this point in time, where I find myself
is that fear is feeding the anger.
Now my anger sits with me.
My fear sits with me.
It sits on...
..my sofa, my bedroom...
My ankle bracelet is a constant reminder
that I'm facing extradition.
We can talk about Arif Naqvi as long as we want.
Hopefully he'll get whatever he deserves to get.
But it wasn't him alone.
His board of directors, you know...
..where the fuck were you?
You know? Because, ultimately...
I mean, I'm surprised they haven't been sued.
I would sue them if I'd lost money.
Without the enabling elements that surrounded him,
it wouldn't have been possible.
I'm one of those creditors. I almost say it like I'm proud...
I'm one of those creditors. Isn't that cool?
The real tragedy of what happened in Abraaj is that hundreds of millions
of dollars that would have otherwise gone to building
healthcare facilities that could have a huge impact in the world
were lost or wasted on lawyers unravelling the mess of Abraaj.
When CEOs are building something,
they can be very public about what they're going to achieve.
When things collapse, the truth disappears
unless journalists dig it out.
Financial firms usually are just in the business of saying
they'll make investors rich.
Abraaj was in the business of saying it could make investors rich
and help end poverty.
But the bigger the promise, the more responsibility they're taking on.
I know what I've done in my life
but, more importantly, I know what I've not done in my life.
And I am crystal clear in front of my Maker
that I have never committed an intentional act of criminality,
nor was I aware of any actions that could have been perceived as such.
If you permit me... This is emotional.
Thank you.