The chief executive officer of the company that owns Dubai’s second-tallest building counts as his mentor the owner of a Northern Virginia coffee bean roasting company who ran a $7 million Ponzi scheme.
Hanif Hassan Moledina, owner of Bean East Corp., admitted to telling investors that he had a lucrative contract to sell Folger’s coffee beans from Colombia. That contract never existed and the 47-year-old used the lie to obtain millions of dollars in high-interest loans from friends. Among them was well-known Washington philanthropist George F. Kettle, who won a $3 million lawsuit against Moledina last March, a month before Kettle died.
Moledina could be ordered to spend the next 13 years behind bars when he’s sentenced Friday in Alexandria’s federal court. Among a series of letters sent to U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis arguing for leniency was a letter from Moledina’s longtime friend, Malcolm Wall Morris.
In October, Morris became the CEO of Dubai Multi Commodities Centre after spending nearly two years as the CEO for the Dubai Gold & Commodities Exchange. The Commodities Centre is the government-owned company that owns, among other things, the 1,191-foot Almas Tower, which sits on a manmade island and is the 16th-tallest building in the world.
In his letter, Morris wrote that he met Moledina in 1997 when he went to work for Moledina’s family-owned coffee trading company. They worked together to create an Internet coffee trading marketplace, greencoffee.com, court documents said.
The business failed a year later despite backing from Italy’s largest coffee roaster Lavazza, and the two parted ways. But, Morris wrote to the judge, “I remained in close contact with [Moledina] as he had become somewhat of a mentor and I was very keen not to lose both his friendship and counsel,” Morris wrote.
In 1999, coffee prices bottomed out and Moledina moved to the United States to take over that branch of his family’s coffee business, documents said. He invested heavily to expand the operation and when the economy began to sour he found himself stretched thin with mounting debts. Moledina admitted that those circumstances led him into lying to banks, friends and family to obtain $7 million in loans. Some of the loans covered the payments for fraudulent loans he obtained earlier.
The government is asking Ellis to require Moledina to pay back the cash.
