xeno1984
MPA (400+ posts)
Abu Dhabi: Malik Noureed Awan’s website calls him the ‘youngest successful businessman of Asia with an aim to conquer the world’ and until late last year there was little to say that his life didn’t epitomise the sobriquet.
He lived it up in style — jet-setting around the world and hobnobbing with the UAE’s elite circles — from sponsoring top cricket events to attending gala black tie functions — with no one in a position to really point a finger.
A self-proclaimed ‘proud Pakistani’, the 20-something’s list of companies too seemed to run the distance — a heavy machinery company, an advertising firm, an online radio, a social networking platform, a welfare organisation, a private airline, a financial investment company in the name of a bank and a forex trading syndicate.
It’s the last one though that’s making the CEO of the MMA Group of companies - named after his father Malik Mushtaq Awan, a man who is said to have made a modest start in the UAE - newsworthy again, albeit for the wrong reasons.
For the uninitiated, at stake is an estimated Dh40 million worth of investments made by some thousands of small- to big-time investors who put their total faith in MMA Forex, the online foreign exchange trading arm of MMA Group. The depositors, some of whom earn a pittance as blue collar workers, say they put their all — from life savings to their personal loan amounts to cash earned from sell-offs — all for promised attractive returns per month.
In reality, however, some have recovered only miniscule portions of their investments going up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in several cases as XPRESS has learnt. Many have yet to see any returns for months now. Some have been forced to quit their jobs and go underground after banks started pestering them for the repayment of loans, and many have had to face far desperate and gruesome consequences.
http://gulfnews.com/about-gulf-news...all-of-jailed-mma-group-businessman-1.1230059
He lived it up in style — jet-setting around the world and hobnobbing with the UAE’s elite circles — from sponsoring top cricket events to attending gala black tie functions — with no one in a position to really point a finger.
A self-proclaimed ‘proud Pakistani’, the 20-something’s list of companies too seemed to run the distance — a heavy machinery company, an advertising firm, an online radio, a social networking platform, a welfare organisation, a private airline, a financial investment company in the name of a bank and a forex trading syndicate.
It’s the last one though that’s making the CEO of the MMA Group of companies - named after his father Malik Mushtaq Awan, a man who is said to have made a modest start in the UAE - newsworthy again, albeit for the wrong reasons.
For the uninitiated, at stake is an estimated Dh40 million worth of investments made by some thousands of small- to big-time investors who put their total faith in MMA Forex, the online foreign exchange trading arm of MMA Group. The depositors, some of whom earn a pittance as blue collar workers, say they put their all — from life savings to their personal loan amounts to cash earned from sell-offs — all for promised attractive returns per month.
In reality, however, some have recovered only miniscule portions of their investments going up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in several cases as XPRESS has learnt. Many have yet to see any returns for months now. Some have been forced to quit their jobs and go underground after banks started pestering them for the repayment of loans, and many have had to face far desperate and gruesome consequences.
http://gulfnews.com/about-gulf-news...all-of-jailed-mma-group-businessman-1.1230059
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