Meghan and the ‘McMafia’ millionaire
Property tycoon who posed with the stars forfeits £10m police say came from money laundering for gangsters
RUBBING shoulders with the rich and famous, Mansoor Hussain proudly posed with celebrities including Meghan Markle, Beyonce and Simon Cowell.
But the millionaire businessman, who loved to boast of his A-list connections on social media, was not all he seemed.
Investigators believe the 40-yearold Poundworld owner laundered vast sums for criminal networks linked to a convicted murderer, drug dealing and arms trafficking.
Now the National Crime Agency has seized almost £10million from the property developer.
In the first successful use of a ‘McMafia’ order – so called after the BBC TV drama series starring James Norton – Hussain has had to hand over 45 properties, including million-pound mansions and apartment blocks in London, Cheshire and Leeds. The NCA used an unexplained wealth order (UWO) to target the alleged criminal, who has spent years flaunting his money. Hussain’s Twitter and Instagram pages are filled with pictures of him posing with stars, politicians and royalty in locations such as Barbados, New York, Monaco and Saint-Tropez.
In one photograph, which he repeatedly posted on social media, he can be seen hugging Meghan Markle at the Global Gift Gala in London in 2013, three years before she met Prince Harry.
After the royal marriage, Hussain republished the image to his 134,000 Instagram followers, captioned: ‘Great night with the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle.’
As the director of a set production company which ran shows for Beyonce, Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams, the Spice Girls and Take
That, Hussain – who calls himself Manni Boss – never missed a photo opportunity. He has been pictured with Topshop tycoon Sir Philip Green, Cherie Blair, Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan and entrepreneur Michelle Mone. On the website of one of his property businesses, 88m, he claims to ‘takes great pride’ in working with The Petra Ecclestone Foundation run by Formula 1 billionaire Bernie Ecclestone’s daughter.
There is no suggestion that any of the celebrities he met were involved in any wrongdoing.
Hussain, who started his first business at 18, boasts of travelling by private jet and owning a fleet of luxury vehicles including RollsRoyces and Range Rovers.
But the NCA believes his jet-set lifestyle was financed by money laundering for notorious gangs.
According to investigators, Hussain has links to Mohammed Nisar Khan, a convicted murderer serving a 26-year sentence. He also used a convicted fraudster as his accountant and allegedly allowed an armed robber to stay at his seven- bedroom mansion and penthouse, the NCA says.
It believes he used threats of violence and blackmail to buy his properties. Investigators realised the scale of his assets only when he submitted 127 lever arch folders and a 76-page statement to explain where his money came from, inadvertently giving officers clues to make a bigger case against him.
UWOs were introduced in 2018 to give the authorities the power to look into the source of wealth of suspected criminals and politically exposed persons.
The one against Hussain last year was the first to be solely based on alleged links to organised crime.
The NCA pursued the case in the civil courts, rather than the criminal courts, due to the difficulty in assembling financial evidence capable of securing a conviction.
Andy Lewis, head of civil recovery at the NCA, said while Hussain initially appeared to be a successful businessman with no convictions, there was a ‘compelling case’ he was an alleged money launderer and had links to those involved in the drugs trade.
‘We showed him the evidence and he decided to come to a settlement with us,’ Mr Lewis said. ‘He took the view that was the best action for him, rather than go to court and potentially lose all those assets.’
A settlement between Hussain and the NCA was agreed on August 24, with the High Court sealing the asset recovery order on October 2.
Hussain was left with four properties, which are said to be ‘highly mortgaged’.
‘Great night with Duchess of Sussex’
One of the best things about Britain has always been its people’s healthy disregard for petty bureaucracy. nothing seems to irk us quite so much as officious officialdom, rules for the sake of rules. We have a kind of innate horror of anyone who applies the letter of the law too obsessively, and a healthy mistrust of authority.
It’s because of this, I suspect, that footage of a socially distanced funeral in Milton Keynes has gone viral. In the video, a son pulls his chair closer to his mother’s in order to put his arm around her, comfort her — only to be reprimanded dramatically by a council official.
The clip shows two other mourners also trying to move closer together to comfort each other before the marshal intervenes, waving his arms and shouting: ‘Sorry, sorry, you have to put the chairs back.’ The result has been a visceral response on social media. And it’s not hard to see why.
There is something so fundamentally inhumane, so inherently heartbreaking about a funeral where mourners are required to sit in isolation as though they have done something terribly wrong.
Where a widow must wear a face mask to say goodbye to the person who has been her companion in life, perched alone on a hard municipal chair with no hand to hold, adrift in a sterile space devoid of all warmth and feeling.
no wonder her son did what he did. How could he not have? It was a small, simple, universal gesture of love at a moment of crushing grief, made all the more necessary by her predicament.
To then witness that fragile dignity rudely interrupted in such an insensitive, jobsworth manner is the kind of thing that, in me at least, makes the red mist descend. It betrayed a complete lack of tact, not to mention a total absence of compassion. no wonder her furious son felt compelled to make the moment public.
AFTER all, as he pointed out himself: ‘I can sit in a restaurant, I can sit in a pub, I can live at her house . . . But when I want to give my mum a cuddle at Dad’s funeral, a man flies out mid-service shouting “Stop the service” and makes us split. A devastating day made even worse.’
Quite. Any normal person would have ignored this minor infraction, or at least looked the other way for a few minutes before gently asking them to move their chairs apart. Instead the man went in like a bull in a china shop.
Whatever the rules, however technically justified he may have been in his actions, it just seems wrong.
But there’s another reason this incident strikes such a chord. It is emblematic of the wider situation in Covid- stricken Britain today. Because this may be just one family at one funeral: but their experience echoes that of the entire nation when it comes to the way this virus has affected all our lives.
It’s not just the way it has divided families and loved ones in their hour of greatest need; it’s the way that the rules and regulations imposed on us as a result of Covid can so often seem unnecessarily draconian, random — and at times completely callous.
Because the man is right: why can he have supper in a restaurant with five complete strangers, but when he wants to hug his mum — with whom he lives — at his father’s funeral, he is treated like a criminal? It is not just unnecessarily cruel, it’s also baffling.
everyone understands the need to contain the virus, to minimise contagion as much as possible. And the majority are more than prepared to respect the Government’s directives for the greater good. But there is
nevertheless a strong sense that in some cases — and this funeral is a clear case in point — the disproportionate response and draconian nature of the restrictions only end up undermining public support for them.
It’s not just funerals, either. These are the kinds of scenes that are playing out daily, all across the nation, in myriad different ways. Women who have been forced to give birth alone; students being locked up in halls of residence; children who are having their educations irretrievably damaged. The elderly who are dying of loneliness because of measures to keep them alive; those with serious illnesses whose care is being delayed.
Every day, we hear more and more stories of idiotic decisions being taken in the name of Covid. There was that restaurant whose owner was fined £1,000 for having a customer on his premises at 10:04pm, four minutes after the official curfew. Four minutes.
Yes, technically I suppose he had broken the rules. But where’s the common sense, where’s the sense of understanding in slapping a business, presumably already struggling, with a crippling fine?
All of this is contributing to a build-up of resentment which the Government simply cannot afford. Especially when you consider the flagrant gaps in logic elsewhere.
The fact that people are squashed like sardines on trains and Tubes. Why is it OK for total strangers to rub shoulders on public transport when members of the same family can’t hug each other at a funeral?
Simple answer: it’s not. And this mixture of illogical, contradictory advice combined with the overzealous nature of many of those tasked with enforcing it, is creating a deep sense of public frustration.
Most of us, I think, are prepared to follow the rules if we think they make sense.
BUT when they manifestly don’t — as in the case of a son not being able to comfort a grieving mother, or a father not being able to witness the birth of a child, it is only natural to start questioning them.
And when the official response is defensiveness, instead of acknowledging people’s concerns; when the authorities just double-down and threaten even more punitive measures — such as, for example, £10,000 fines — people respond less with meek acquiescence than with renewed outrage. They go from being broadly sympathetic and compliant to feeling angry, hurt and defiant. That spirit of ‘we are all in this together’ starts to wear thin — to be replaced by confusion and resentment. And you end up in serious danger of losing the dressing room.
Which is a worry, because if we are to have any chance of beating Covid, the country needs to pull together as a team.
There is a reason Britain voted for Brexit, and why it gave a Brexiteer Conservative Prime Minister a landslide victory in last year’s General Election. Not for us the rigid, blind unquestioning bureaucracy of Brussels: we pride ourselves on our independentminded self-determination. We’ve had our fill of pointless regulation and over-zealous autocrats.
And yet here we are, less than a year on, mired it seems in both.
The day we become a country where a son cannot hug his own mother at his father’s funeral is a day when we have to seriously question the direction we’re going in.
Yes, these are trying times; yes, we must all do our best to fight Covid; yes, sacrifices must be made. But not at the cost of our fundamental freedoms and rights.
Because at the end of the day, these are what Britain has always stood for. And nothing, not even a pandemic, should shake us from those foundations.