by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

You might call him the crook that fell to Earth.

Ten years ago, Mohamed Badawy Al-Husseiny was sitting next to Sir Richard Branson at the Oshkosh air show signing a deal on behalf of Abu Dhabi to invest $280 million in the British billionaire’s space tourism venture, Virgin Galactic.

The wealthy CEO of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, aabar investments, likely had dreams of gazing down on Earth while floating in space aboard Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo.

Today, Al-Husseiny is sitting in a jail cell serving a 10-year sentence for financial crimes. He also has been implicated in one of the largest financial frauds in history involving the theft of more than $4 billion.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. (Credit: Red Granite Pictures)

The scandal engulfing Aabar Investments just keeps getting stranger and stranger.

The U.S. Justice Department has charged that some of the funds allegedly stolen from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB ended up funding The Wolf of Wall Street, a hit movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio as corrupt Wall Street stock broker Jordan Belfort.
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Sir Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic pilots, staffers and investors. To his right is Mohamed Badawy Al-Husseiny, CEO of Aabar, during the Oshkosh airshow in 2009. (Credit: Douglas Messier)

It’s been quite a while since we’ve checked in with our friends over at Aabar Investments, the Abu Dhabi-owned sovereign wealth fund that invested $390 million into Virgin Galactic in exchange for a 37.6-percent share of Sir Richard Branson’s space line.

And boy, do I wish we had checked in sooner. There’s been some real serious [expletive deleted] going down with that investment over the past year. Real serious you know what.

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