A restaurant waiter who set up his business with just £20 and six boxes of prawns is celebrating as he is now worth £80million.
Shelim Hussain was a teenager studying for his A-levels when he drove to London with the tiny sum of money.
He picked up six boxes of prawns and then sold them once he was back in Cardiff for £150.
Initially, he had been motivated to make money because of love.
He had hoped he could convince the woman of his dreams, and her family, that he could make money, reports Wales Online.
But that simple purchase of prawns would mark Shelim’s first foray into business which within 10 years would be turning over £40million.
Shelim got the girl – Bobi – and went on to grow his business which would become the UK’s largest supplier to the Asian food market with a £105m turnover and 1,500 staff worldwide.
Today he has depots all over the UK, in the US, and in Bangladesh.
"I started with nothing," said Shelim, who came to the UK from Bangladesh when he was just 11 years old.
"In Bangladesh I was poor but I was happy. I was running around jungles finding fish to eat. It was a fantastic childhood but now I get really scared when I think about it." He's referring to the times he stuck his hands in holes looking for woodpeckers but risking a snake bite.
It's a far cry from the life he's built for Bobi and their three children, who today live comfortably in their Newport home.
"It's like Slumdog Millionaire," he chuckled as he recalled his early life. "Basically my family paid £3,000 for me to come here with the people I was told to call mum and dad."
His real parents stayed in Bangladesh while Shelim had to make a new life in Cardiff.
He went to Cathays High School and finished his GCSEs at Trowbridge. It was the "worst childhood ever," he said.
"I used to save up the dinner tickets and sell them to buy clothes from Oxfam," he remembers.
“The first time I saw a white person was in the British Embassy," he continued.
He landed in the UK on January 3, 1985, when there was snow on the ground.
His 11-year-old brain tried to make sense of it.
"I came from a tropical country where there was mud and soil which is why I thought we were brown. And the soil in this new country was white so that's why people are white. It took me three months until I realised I was wrong when the snow melted away."
Life changed for Shelim when he fell in love aged 18 with Bobi, who was just 15 at the time.
Wealth was the main thing to create, he said, if he wanted to marry her.
"I couldn't stop looking at her each day but I had nothing to give her," he said.
He supplemented his four paper rounds at the time with work as a waiter at the Indian Ocean restaurant in Cardiff.
When the restaurant’s prawn supplier went out of business the business-minded teen spotted an opportunity.
Shelim drove to London and came back with six boxes of prawns from a wholesaler and started selling them to local restaurants.
His business was born.
Six months down the line he was making £600 every week.
“I wanted to be a lawyer but then I realised how long that journey would be and this was an opportunity too good to miss," he said.
The business grew from there and soon he was selling prawns, chicken, and lamb to Indian restaurants.
He never did his A-levels.
He married Bobi when he was 20 and his business expanded.
"I couldn't stop because once you stop you fall behind," he said.
In 1994 he had two premises and said to himself: "I'm going to conquer Cardiff, Newport, and Bristol."
Today 10% of his business is in Wales with the rest across the border.
The thing about importing food on a global scale is that everything is done on credit insurance, Shelim explained.
The sums are so vast when buying goods the whole business relies on it.
With his business shrouded in an ongoing fraud case, Euro Foods Group found their credit insurance withdrawn and with it its £30m buying power.
"I lost cover which meant they wouldn't give me goods which meant I didn't have anything to sell my customers the next day," he said.
"Everybody thought EFG was going bust but that wasn't the case. We simply had no cash."
It was hard for the boy from Cardiff who was trusted by those small independents he supplied but not able to convince the faceless companies who operated on a bigger scale.
The damage was done and everybody was waiting for his business to fail, he says as he lets out a heavy sigh.
Shelim dug deep into his own pockets and sold his assets abroad where he could and pumped his own cash into it to keep the company going.
Then in 2017, he was the subject of a tax investigation for a "small matter" and the business went into an even worse situation. The banks stopped supporting him too. "You couldn't make it up," he said.
There was one supplier who continued to work with EFG all the way through: Brazilian poultry giant BRF SA.
But then that company was banned from the EU in 2017 after Brazilian police investigated it for bribing government inspectors to get meat and exports approved to countries all over the world including Saudi Arabia, China, the EU, and the UAE.
Shelim owed them £21m when he stopped trading with them.
"Everybody wrote us off," said Shelim – and even he did until a solution presented itself in a dream.
Thanks to some restructuring – selling off Kukd.com to the management team – he's still here today, having paid back half of what he took from the government grant and with an arrangement to pay back the rest in monthly instalments.
The Welsh Government confirmed, "the company continues to make repayments".
"I have to honour my word," he said. "My whole life has been about honouring my word."
The fraud investigation fizzled out – but not before he'd lost a seat next to Deborah Meadon on the Dragons' Den programme. Looking for a replacement for one of the Dragons Shelim made the final cut after several screen tests.
The producers held off for as long as possible while the investigation was ongoing but in the end they had to choose someone else.
He would be more bitter about that if it wasn't for the fact another TV show came looking and he appeared on that instead. He's not allowed to say what it is yet but, suffice to say, it gave him an insight into his own business that made him cry at times. It will be aired later this year, he thinks.
Just when things were falling back into place Covid came along with an unlikely boost. "Straightaway I realised we needed to focus on takeaways," Shelim said.
"In the first lockdown McDonald's, Burger King, Nando's were all closed. Takeaways were the only industry open and that's what helped us." EFG was one of the only suppliers open nationally, servicing 4,000 restaurants across the UK each week.
It meant 2020 would be one of their most profitable years yet and 2021 is proving to be even better, he said.
Even better, those banks and insurance companies which were quick to pull the plug just a few years earlier started offering to cover him once again, which is somewhat ironic, he says.
"EFG is the most profitable it's ever been in my lifetime," he added. In 2019 they made £500,000 and that's set to increase tenfold in 2021 to £5m.
"That's from me sacrificing my health for my business," he added. "The last three years have been really bad. I've saved my company but it's affected my health."
With a cash facility back in the millions he's just bought an abattoir in Dorset and he's expanding his depots across the UK. He's retiring in the next few months, he says, but it doesn't sound much like it.
"My job is to see the future," he said about his decision to buy an abattoir. He wants to secure his own supply of meat in the UK because "China is hungry and eating everything".
His shrewd business operations mean he has a diverse portfolio of interests – he owns all the premises he operates in and even rents some to the NHS. He retained a windfall agreement in Kukd.com and is looking forward to finally enjoying life with Bobi.
"I want to travel the world with my wife," he said. "My job has taken me around the world but all I ever saw was the airport lounges, the inside of a taxi, and the hotel rooms – never the country I was in. It was factory, hotel, factory."
Looking after family is clearly important to him and he won't let me leave without popping my head in to see his daughter who oversees digital marketing from her rather pink office.
"Nobody is poor anymore," he said about his extended family. Home might once have been Bangladesh, and he's clearly not forgotten about where he came from, but now his real home is "wherever Bobi is".
