BARONESS Michelle Mone has dismissed claims that her latest business wheeze has “ended in a fiasco”.
Earlier this year, the Glaswegian businesswoman, who David Cameron ennobled in 2015, appointing her to the House of Lords as his entrepreneur tsar, launched what’s known as an initial coin offering (ICO).
The ICO is an unregulated way for a company to raise money from members of the public. By using crypto-currencies like bitcoin, and ether, they bypass securities laws designed to protect investors.
At the time of the launch Mone told the Business Insider that she was “one of the biggest experts in Cryptocurrency and Blockchain”.
The peer and her partner Doug Barrowman had hoped to raise $80 million from investors for their crypto-currency EQUI.
However, according to the FT, they managed just $7m.
After launching a two-week pre-sale a on March 1, with a minimum required investment of $100,000, EQUI put out a press release on March 6 boasting that it had raised a nice, round $7m “in only a few days”.
However, they had still only raised $7m at the end of June.
At that point, EQUI abandoned the ICO and relaunched as “EQUI Global”.
EQUI told the Financial Times: “Our Founders are conventional business people with a track record of over 300 years in business between them. They have all found the ICO World Of Business a very strange place of doing business with some very alarming things going on. Therefore we will not be doing an ICO going forward and instead we will be focusing on our Token Blockchain technology.”
The FT pointed out that it wasn’t possible for the founders to have a track record of “over 300 years in business” given that there were only two of them, Mone and Barrowman.
Her spokesman said Mone had been busy in Silicon Valley working with the company’s newest signing, rumoured to be Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
“Our EQUI business hasn’t been a flop or failure, quite the contrary. We stopped our launch as we are working on a massive global announcement that will take the business from a UK focused into a global business overnight,” they said.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel