As rise and falls go the story of Abdul Alim and Shahzad Mughal reads like a film script.
Back in 2014 the duo from Greater Manchester were looking for inspiration for a business idea when they decided to watch the 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report.
“There’s a scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks into a shopping centre and all the boards start to change and begin talking to him,” recalled Alim. “We thought ‘wow, if we could build that, it’d be amazing’.”
Within 18 months the pair had launched OfferMoments (rebranded as Bidooh in 2018) and embarked on a journey that saw them meet the Queen, travel the world, raise millions of pounds in investment and even spark talk of being the next unicorn.
This week Alim and Mughal were back in the headlines again – but for altogether different reasons. The duo admitted to cloning the business after six months of legal action brought against them by the very company they founded.
The deception, which went back months, was played out in legal documents filed at the High Court of Justice in London and Alim and Mughal have until April 29 to pay Bidooh’s interim costs of £80,000.
“I dreamt of building a multi-million pound company,” Alim (pictured below) told BusinessCloud. “Now I’ve got nothing.”
What’s unusual is he doesn’t dispute any of the facts of the court case. He admits to going behind his investors’ backs and cloning the business he co-founded with a view to going into partnership with a new third party.
He even admits to sending offensive messages on WhatsApp about fellow Bidooh stakeholders. “When your blood is boiling you say things out of line,” he said. “I regret some of the things I said.”
Nutty … full post here …
Leave a comment