A business partner of the former Barclays boss Bob Diamond, who is reportedly Africa’s youngest billionaire, is facing a high court battle in London over alleged offshore assets he is accused of hiding from his estranged wife.
Ashish Thakkar, 34, claimed he was worth less than £500,000 in an attempt to defend himself from a multimillion-pound settlement claim from Meera Manek, a travel and food writer.
She claims Thakkar has concealed assets in the British Virgin Islands. But he told a high court hearing on Wednesday that the beneficiaries of the Mara Group, his IT, banking and property empire, were his mother and sister.
His barrister told the court his assets were valued at £445,432.
Manek has contested this and Mr Justice Moor ruled there should be a full trial to assess the truth of the competing claims.
The high court on Tuesday heard of the “remarkable” story of Thakkar, whose family fled the Rwanda genocide in 1994 and resettled in Uganda.
His family were evacuated to Hôtel des Mille Collines, which is featured in the film Hotel Rwanda.
His parents had lost everything in the 1970s when they became Asian refugees of Idi Amin’s Uganda, and started again in Leicester where Thakkar was born.
When they were financially secure they sold up and moved to Rwanda, a year before the genocide took place.
It is this refugee past that Thakkar says drove him to drop out of school and become an entrepreneur selling computer parts. Twenty years after starting his business in a shopping mall in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, his company now employs more than 11,000 people across 25 countries.
According to his skeleton argument, Thakkar’s “passion is to be a driving force for positive and economic change in Africa and not to make money for himself”.
He is also chairman of the United Nations Foundation global entrepreneurs council and founded the Mara Foundation in 2009, which serves as an online mentorship portal for young African entrepreneurs. Three years ago he was appointed to the advisory board of technology company Dell.
In 2013, he also became the first African to be named in Fortune magazine’s annual 40 under 40 list, with total assets said to be in excess of $1bn and employees across 21 African countries.
In her skeleton argument, Manek claimed Thakkar was being dishonest and that documents showed a Panamanian foundation was formerly at the helm of the Mara Group structure, a structure of which he was the primary beneficiary. She was a secondary beneficiary, it was claimed.
The foundation was dissolved shortly after she issued divorce proceedings in summer 2014, according to her argument in court.
Moor said he “could not take as truth” any of the assertions on either side and ruled there should be a full hearing in which both parties should give evidence next February.
“Trust structures, particularly offshore foundations, bearer shares and the like are notoriously difficult issues for the family court,” he said.
One of the businesses he set up is Atlas Mara, which he recently started with Diamond, court papers showed.
Manek, who was educated at the University of Warwick and whose work has been published in the Daily Telegraph and Conde Nast Traveller, was married to Thakkar for just under four and a half years.
