An Indian-born businessman whose playboy lifestyle was allegedly funded by a complex scam targeting Australasian businessmen has – more than a decade after allegations of fraud were first made – been arrested in London and extradited to Switzerland to stand trial.
United Kingdom court rulings reveal Ahsan Ali Syed was arrested in London and recently extradited to Switzerland on charges of running a sophisticated advance fee fraud through his Western Gulf Advisory (WGA) companies that extracted $59.5 million from victims, including former Apprentice New Zealand host Terry Serepisos.
Ali denies the charges.
His present state of affairs – having been denied bail after arrest in London in November 2022, and now said to be stateless and awaiting trial in a Zurich jail cell – marks a staggering fall from grace for a man who a decade ago commanded business and sporting headlines while self-identifying as a billionaire.
Ali had travelled around Europe on a private jet with an extensive entourage of contracted public relations and security personnel while kicking the tyres of professional sporting teams in Europe, and offered generous refinancing terms to businessmen teetering after the Global Financial Crisis.
Prosecutors, and reporting from New Zealand media in 2011, allege while WGA charged millions in upfront fees to arrange these purported loans, no funds were ever delivered to clients.
In Ali’s attempts to appeal his extradition, London courts heard that the Zurich Public Prosecutors Office alleges fraud proceeds were used to buy luxury property, a private jet, and a Spanish first division football team. After conducting high-profile due diligence in mid-2010 for an unsuccessful $700m bid for English Premier League team Blackburn Rovers, Ali instead settled on purchasing Spanish La Liga team Racing Santander in February 2011.
But even within WGA, doubts were beginning to germinate.
Julie Thiem was employed for nine months during this period as WGA’s PR manager after being headhunted to join the Bahrain-based firm in mid-2010.
She was surprised to find herself one of only a few employees of a firm claimed to have nearly $1 billion to invest, and soon found herself working out of a conference room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.
“I still don’t fully understand where the money was coming from,” she said.
“I wasn’t part of the scam. I was just someone who, maybe bit naively, took a job opportunity.”
She said the Blackburn Rovers deal fell out partly over critical reporting by the BBC noting Ali’s lack of business history and unpaid council taxes, and attempts to media-train Ali to better prepare him for future interviews were a disaster.
“I remember we were sitting at this hotel in Switzerland and we were grilling him: You need to ask him these uncomfortable questions. After one and a half hours he just burst out of the room like a maniac. He couldn’t get his story straight when questioned about his apparent old money family wealth from India,” she said.
Thiem said she was moved from PR to running Ali’s private office, a role involving organising the shipping of his luxury cars around Europe – including Maserati, Bentley, Porsche – and travelling with him in the company jet to visit art and jewellery showrooms.
Her job ended ignominiously, she says, when she was sent to the south of France to scout motor-racing teams for Ali to purchase, before she was left to cover her three-week hotel bill.
Thiem said her involvement with alleged victims was largely as window-dressing, with Ali taking them on a quick tour of the office to show off his multinational staff.
“He was showing them around the office ‘Germany, UK, Spain - look at my European office.’ I never talked to them.”
WGA came to public attention in early 2011 during the financial troubles of Serepisos. Barely a year after the property mogul had hosted the New Zealand version of The Apprentice, walls were closing in as second-tier lenders folded and demanded repayment and a property market slump gobbled up equity.
Several liquidation hearings for Serepisos’ firms were repeatedly pushed back following claims that US$100m from WGA was due to soon arrive that would satisfy creditors. Ali was also talked about as a possible new owner of Serepisos’ Wellington Phoenix football team.
The cheque never arrived.
Legal action in Switzerland is understood to have been largely driven by New Zealand lawyer and former police officer Mark van Leewarden.
His firm Warden Consulting conducts recovery action for fraud victims, and he first became involved in the WGA case in 2011 acting for New Zealand developer Gary McNabb.
McNabb, best-known as the founder of NZ Mint, realised following media reports that US$750,000 (NZ$1.3m) he had paid WGA in fees for a purported US$50m loan was likely lost.
He hired Warden Consulting, he said at the time, “to shut down a very clever fraudster”.
In May 2011 Leewarden secured freezing orders against WGA accounts held with Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse.
A representative for the McNabb family said they had nothing to say about Syed or WGA.
Leewarden is understood to now act for many Australian and New Zealand WGA victims, but declined to answer Herald questions this week about recent developments.
“Due to where the proceedings are currently placed I am prevented from making any comment,” he said.
Law enforcement action has been significantly complicated by questions of jurisdiction. The majority of victims were Australasian – although it is reported at least one is from Ireland – with contracts typically signed in Bahrain, and funds transmitted to Swiss banks.
In his failed appeal against extradition, Ali said he had been subject to an investigation in Bahrain over the fraud allegations pursued by Swiss authorities, and no charges were laid.
Ali cut contact with Swiss authorities years ago and appears to have initially retreated to Bahrain as complaints mounted, then Turkey where he gained a passport and renounced his Indian citizenship.
As WGA vanished from the web and Ali’s business reputation became tattered, he appears to have tried reinventing himself as a religious leader. In 2015 he published a book entitled One God, One Religion, One Life.
He contemporaneously set up a YouTube channel promoting his spiritual lectures. Last week his subscriber count, after hundreds of videos and nearly a decade of sermonising, stood at 33.
His Facebook account shows him visiting – months before his 2022 arrest – religious sites in the Iraqi city of Karbala.
Following his arrest, authorities in Turkey revoked his passport, leaving the fraud-accused now in the unusual and precarious position of being stateless.
The effect on victims of the alleged fraud, largely over-leveraged property developers weathering real estate decline and credit tightening brought about by the global financial crisis and in desperate need of refinancing, was devastating.
Both Serepisos and McNabb were later declared bankrupt.
Within months of Ali’s purchase of Racing Santander, tax and overdue salary payments started being missed, and the club later entered bankruptcy and slid out of La Liga and down two divisions.
Requests for comment to Serepisos this week went unanswered.
Questions to Syed’s London-based lawyer, who represented him in ultimately unsuccessful appeals against extradition to Switzerland, also went unanswered.
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. In 2011 he broke the first story about Western Gulf Advisory being an apparent advance fee fraud. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.