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.