Sev Vettivetpillai may plead guilty in alleged Abraaj fraud case

The extradition of Arif M. Naqvi, from the United Kingdom to the U.S., is currently awaiting approval by the U.K. government. In January, a U.K. judge ruled that Naqvi can be extradited to the U.S. to face charges tied to investors and creditors losing more than $1 billion in his Abraaj funds due to alleged misappropriation.

Naqvi founded Dubai based Abraaj to invest in management buy-outs of companies, growth capital opportunities, greenfield projects and privatizations, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. At its peak, it managed about $14 billion for clients including the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corp. and Bank of America.

In 2018, Abraaj collapsed into insolvency reportedly following a conflict with investors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, over a $1 billion healthcare fund. “Naqvi misappropriated money from the Health Fund,” the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a 2019 filing in a New York court.

Alleging that Abraaj operated as a criminal organization, U.S. prosecutors have charged Naqvi with taking nearly $400 million from the firm over a nine-year period. Former Abraaj officials charged along with Naqvi include Sivendran (Sev) Vettivetpillai, Waqar Siddique and Mustafa Abdel-Wadood, managing partners, Ashish Dave, Chief Financial Officer and Rafique Lakhani, vice president.

In June 2019, Abdel-Wadood, an Egyptian, pleaded guilty and agreed to co-operate with U.S. prosecutors. In 2016, Abraaj “raised approximately $3 billion from entities and individuals, including several U.S.-based investors” by lying about its financial health, Wadood stated in his settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “We painted a rosy picture of a prosperous firm, when, in fact, the firm was experiencing…severe liquidity issues…I approved valuations that I knew were inflated.”

In 2019, Vettivetpillai was arrested from his home in Pinner, North London and jailed briefly in Wandsworth prison, before being released on bail, according to news reports. U.S. prosecutors alleged that he was the most senior partner at Abraaj who knowingly misled investors. About a year later, in last June, Vettivetpillai reportedly agreed to plead guilty, co-operate with U.S. prosecutors and to be extradited to the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal.  

Earlier In April 2018, after he left Abraaj, Vettivetpillai was appointed chief executive of Liechtenstein’s LGT Impact Ventures. It is part of LGT's 90-years-old private banking and asset management business, owned by the country’s ruling family and with more than $200 billion in assets. Less than a year later, in February 2019, Vettivetpillai left LGT.

From 1996, Vettivetpillai worked at the CDC Group, a private equity firm based in London. In 2009, he founded the Aureos Capital Group, after leading a management buy-out of the private equity firm owned by CDC and Norfund, the Norwegian Development Finance Institution. In 2011, Vettivetpillai hired M. Damodaran, the former head of SEBI, India’s stock exchange regulatory body, while seeking to raise a new $200 million India fund. The next year, Vettivetpillai merged Aureos with Arif Naqvi’s Abraaj Capital to form The Abraaj Group.

A Chartered Financial Analyst, Vettivetpillai earned a BEng in Civil Engineering from Imperial College, U.K. Originally from Sri Lanka, he is now a U.K. citizen. On his website, he says he is an avid cricket fan, who keenly follows the Sri Lankan cricket team.

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