An airline tycoon saw his fortune go down the drain after secret loans were uncovered.
Vijay Mallya headed up a multi-billion dollar empire after making his riches selling Kingfisher beer.
The brand quickly expanded, branching out into Formula 1 racing and even aviation.
The tycoon once headed up a major Indian airline (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
At its peak, Kingfisher Airlines was the second largest domestic carrier in India.
Mallya also became a member of parliament and earned the nickname ‘King of Good Times’ thanks to his extravagant lifestyle, however, things would all come crashing down.
His airline began suffering from financial losses, ultimately closing down in 2015 with over $1 billion in bank loans.
At the time, Mallya was accused under Indian law of money laundering and just months later, in March 2016, the former tycoon moved to the UK, claiming he wanted to be closer to his children.
A joint petition was signed by 17 banks and delivered to the Supreme Court of India in a bid to stop Mallya from leaving the country but he had already fled.
A month later, his passport was revoked and Mallya resigned from his position as a member of parliament.
Just over a year after he left India, in April 2017, Mallya was arrested and later released on bail by the UK Metropolitan Police extradition unit on behalf of Indian authorities.
In May 2017, the billionaire was found guilty of contempt of court by the Supreme Court of India and summoned to appear in July.
Vijay Mallya earned the nickname ‘King of Good Times’ thanks to his extravagant lifestyle (Darren Heath/Getty Images)
But Mallya refused to attend, calling the accusations a ‘witch hunt’.
By October, the tycoon was arrested for money laundering as part of a case in London and was released on bail.
In 2022, India’s Supreme Court found Mallya guilty of contempt of court for transferring $40 million to his children, which was in violation with court orders.
The court sentenced him to four months in prison and he was instructed to deposit $40 million plus 8% interest within four weeks to the Supreme Court legal services authority.
Mallya was warned that a failure to do so would result in more of his properties being seized and an additional jail sentence of two months.
However, despite warnings and attempts made by the Indian government to get Mallya into a courtroom, it’s believed that he is still in London to this day.
Without a passport, the failed airline boss is unable to leave the UK as he awaits a final hearing on extradition back to India.
Mallya is still active on social media, with his X, formerly Twitter, bio claiming that he is a ‘targeted victim of the Indian government’.
Featured Image Credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Finance mogul once worth over $65,000,000,000 wound up behind bars after lucrative scam was revealed
He secretly ran the largest known Ponzi scheme in history
Warning: This article contains mention of suicide which some readers may find distressing.
A former finance mogul who was once worth over $65 billion spent the rest of his life behind bars after a shocking scam was uncovered.
And the truth behind the business revealed the largest ever known Ponzi scheme in history.
Bernie Madoff kicked off his career back in 1960 when he founded a penny stock brokerage, which eventually grew into a much larger firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.
Bernie Madoff ran the largest ever known Ponzi scheme (TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Working as the company’s chairman, Madoff also employed his two sons, Mark and Andrew, and his brother, Peter.
The wealth management business grew into a multibillion dollar empire over the years and at its peak, it was worth over $65 billion, but things started to unravel as the 2008 recession hit.
Madoff had been fraudulently using new investments to pay off other investors but under the financial slump, he began struggling to make ends meet.
In December 2008, the former mogul confided to a senior employee, which was later revealed by Bloomberg to be one of his sons, that he couldn’t make the payments.
For years, Madoff had been using money from investors to deposit into his own business account, withdrawing from that same account when they requested redemptions.
To the sons’ surprise, their father then shared that he intended to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses out to employees months earlier than scheduled.
When Mark and Andrew confronted Madoff about it, he admitted that the business was ‘one big lie’ and a ‘massive Ponzi scheme’.
His sons turned him into the authorities and in March 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies.
Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In June 2009, Madoff was sentenced to a whopping 150 years in federal prison.
The then 71-year-old made a statement to the victims of his crimes, saying: “I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren. This was something I will live in for the rest of my life. I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.”
Commenting on the fact that no letters from friends or family defending Madoff had been written, Judge Chin said: “The absence of such support was telling.”
The judge added that the fraud was ‘staggering’ and ‘extraordinarily evil’.
In December 2010, on the two-year anniversary of his father’s arrest, Mark died by suicide.
In 2014, Madoff’s younger son Andrew lost his life to lymphoma.
Madoff spent the rest of his life in incarceration, dying in 2021 at a federal prison for inmates with special health needs.
Featured Image Credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
The world’s youngest and richest self-made female billionaire lost it all after an investigation uncovered the shocking truth behind her business
The former mogul is now serving 11 years behind bars
One entrepreneur climbed her way to becoming the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire before everything she built crumbled.
Elizabeth Holmes made her fortune by founding an innovative blood-test company which revolutionized the system.
Aged just 19, Holmes was a student at Stanford University when she launched Theranos in 2003, which was touted as a breakthrough health tech company.
Elizabeth Holmes launched her business at the age of 19 (Philip Pacheco/Getty Images)
She came up with the idea for a wearable patch that was capable of adjusting the dosage of drug delivery and was able to notify doctors of any variables in the blood.
The firm claimed that it was able to conduct blood tests using compact automated devices that required very small amounts of blood.
Holmes said that she was inspired by her own fear of needles and Theranos raised over $700 million in investments. By 2013, the company was valued at a whopping $9 billion.
However, things started to take a turn when The Wall Street Journal started a secret investigation after getting a tip from a medical expert over Theranos’ blood testing device.
Despite legal and financial threats from the billionaire’s lawyer, the article was published in October 2015 which described how the device gave inaccurate results.
In 2018, both Holmes and the firm’s former president, Ramesh Balwani, were charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for taking over $700 million from investors by advertising a false product.
The firm was also found to have lied about its revenue, claiming to have made $100 million in 2014 when in reality it made just $100,000.
The former health tech mogul is now serving 11 years in prison (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Four years later, the health tech mogul was indicted on fraud charges and, following a trial, she was convicted of defrauding investors and acquitted of defrauding patients.
As a result, Holmes was sentenced to serve 11 and a quarter years at a federal minimum-security prison.
She was also jointly ordered with Balwani to pay $452 million in restitution to victims of the fraud.
Although proceedings were delayed due to Holmes having two children, her first in 2021 and her second in 2023, she denied it was a tactic to avoid jail time.
Speaking to People last month, she said: “I know how the optics look, but I always wanted to be a mother. I truly did not think I would ever be convicted or found guilty. I kept talking to my lawyers and they also assured me we would never get this far.
“It wasn’t planned and I can’t worry about what others think. It’s just when the timing happened.”
In May 2023, Holmes surrendered herself to custody to begin her prison sentence and she is expected to be released in 2032, after two years were knocked off for good behavior.
Her business, Theranos, is no longer running and has been dissolved.
Featured Image Credit: Philip Pacheco/Getty Images
How the richest man in Ireland worth over $6,000,000,000 lost everything and ended up bankrupt
The businessman’s hidden loans came to light during the 2008 recession
Imagine going from the richest man in the country to bankrupt within four years.
Well, that was the reality for one businessman who was once considered to be the wealthiest person in Ireland.
At the peak of his wealth, Sean Quinn had a net worth of around $6 billion in February 2008 and was even named in Forbes magazine’s 2008 Rich List.
Sean Quinn was once the richest man in Ireland (PETER MUHLY/AFP via Getty Images)
Quinn’s career in business began back in 1967 when he took over his father’s family farm.
However, he wasn’t a keen farmer and while the land didn’t have much agricultural success, it was rich in minerals.
Spotting an opportunity to make bank, Quinn began extracting gravel from the farm before washing it and selling it to builders in the local area.
In 1973, the entrepreneur founded Quinn Group and transformed his small quarry into a huge company that employed over 8,000 people across Europe.
And his savvy business mind didn’t stop him there as Quinn Cement was followed by the setup of Quinn Hotels and later, Quinn Glass.
In 1996, Quinn Financial Services was founded which included Quinn Direct insurance.
Quinn was also a shareholder of Anglo Irish Bank and in July 2008, he increased his family’s stake to 15%.
However, this is where things took a turn as the financial recession hit towards the end of that year, causing a massive blow to the Quinn family’s finances.
It transpired that Quinn had used secret loans to buy shares in the bank and when the Irish government announced that it was taking control of the Anglo Irish Bank, it discovered these hidden loans.
The former mogul was declared bankrupt in 2012 (PETER MUHLY/AFP via Getty Images)
In a statement at the time, Quinn said: “These loans breached insurance regulations and as a result of this the Financial Regulator has sanctioned Quinn Insurance and myself. I accept complete responsibility for this breach of regulation.
“While I accept that I made mistakes, I feel that the levels of fines do not reflect the fact that there was no risk to policyholders or the taxpayer but are a result of the pressures existing in the current environment. However, we will pay the fines and move on.”
Quinn Insurance was handed a €3.25 million ($3.55 million) fine from the Financial Regulator in Ireland and Quinn was personally fined €200,000 ($218,322).
In 2010, Dublin’s High Court ruled that Quinn Insurance would be put into administration.
Following liquidation litigation, Quinn was declared bankrupt in January 2012.
And in November 2012, the former mogul was sentenced to nine weeks in prison for contempt of court after refusing to hand over nearly €3 billion ($3.28 billion) worth of assets to the nationalised bank.
Handing Quinn his sentence, at the time Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne said: “In my view, he has only himself to blame.”
Featured Image Credit: PETER MUHLY/AFP via Getty Images
Inside MrBeast’s one-room apartment he lives in despite making millions of dollars a year
Is it what you expected?
MrBeast is well known for his absolutely massive YouTube videos, and with tens of millions of followers across a whole range of social media platforms, it would be easy to assume he lives a pretty glitzy lifestyle.
Well, that might be true at times, but a new video has showcased the one-room apartment that he most regularly lives in, and it’s surprisingly mundane.
TV personality Howie Mandel was interviewing MrBeast, whose real name is James Donaldson, and managed to grab a quick tour of the area of the MrBeast empire where Donaldson spends his free time.
As Donaldson explains, although he has a house that he can go to when he wants, in order to cut down on driving and spend as much time as he can at work, he has a small apartment in the office.
This is basically a studio apartment, with a bed in the corner, a TV and couch, a gaming PC setup and a small bathroom ensuite.
You can see how amazed Mandel is at the modesty of the setup, which was toured before Mandel interviewed Donaldson on his podcast. It has some fun little knick-knacks in it, but is really not that full of stuff at all.
After checking out the apartment, they go out into a hallway just outside and get a look at a wall display of just some of the many channel awards that MrBeast’s network has attracted.
YouTube sends a plaque to each channel that reaches 100,000 subscribers or more, then another when you hit a million, 10 million and 100 million.
Getty/Steve Granitz / Contributor
MrBeast has so many successful channels that he has an impressive array of multiple 10 million subscriber plaques (albeit only one 100 million award, rare as they are). As he explains, many of these are for channels set up to run MrBeast videos that are translated and dubbed over.
That one-room living situation has people pretty amazed in the comments under Mandel’s video, unsurprisingly, with one person writing in shock: “There’s work from home, and then there’s home at work”.
Another person wrote, clearly impressed: “You can’t knock MB. Dude literally started with nothing and just committed his entire life to YT. From the bottom up”.
Given that Fortune estimates the annual revenue of MrBeast’s network of channels at somewhere between $500 and $700 million annually, it’s pretty stunning to see someone who could presumably be living a life of leisure in mansions and aboard private jets instead choosing to live in such tight confines.
Perhaps the next step will be to build a more comfortable and slightly more luxurious abode on the doorstep of his studio but, in the meantime, it looks like we can all imagine MrBeast chilling out in his one-room world.