Think like a billionaire: part 2

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Olivia Lee:Today, Think Like a Billionaire, part two.

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1:17Olivia Lee:before we get started this is the second episode in a two-part series so make sure you've listened to part one first

1:27oh my god this is it i think yeah because we've seen this on google maps this entrance Apparently it's got her name on it so we're just checking. Oh, here we go. Julie Maria Meyer.

1:39Olivia Lee:Guardian reporters Olivia Lee and Juliet Garside are in Zurich. It's cold. It's January. They're outside the apartment of Julie Meyer. Top floor, looks like. I mean, if you go by the buzzers, it looks like it's on the top floor. Yeah, this is a very nice place to live. They're having to whisper because they don't want Julie to hear them. Oh my god, she could appear any moment. We kind of have to keep our heads down a little bit. For the past 18 months, Olivia and Juliet have been digging into Julie Meyer. They followed a trail of missing money, and businesses plunged into crisis by broken promises.

2:19Olivia Lee:The people who say Julie went off with their money want answers, and so Olivia and Juliet are in Zurich to get them. Oh my god, that could be her. It's a blonde person. It is a blonde person. I'm feeling. Really nervous. I can feel my heart beating. This is our one moment. I really hope it's her. Will Julie Meyer finally give her side of the story? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Think like a billionaire, part two.

2:56Olivia Lee:It's 2023, and Barcelona gin founder Stefan Lisbeth is celebrating a folk festival in his local village. He's outside, enjoying the sunshine, having a drink with a close friend. This guy suddenly told me, listen, I have a very good idea for you if you're looking for investment for your company. I know this woman who's organising a big seminar. And Stefan gets introduced to Julie Meyer, MBE. She said, I've been looking what you've been doing and I really think you should join our programme and join our seminar. Stefan says he's told the seminar is all about meeting investors. It'll cost him thousands of euros.

3:33Olivia Lee:But his is a small company, and that is a lot of money. So he comes up with an idea. He'll service Jin at the seminar's opening party and bring his band with him instead of paying the full fee. It was a really big success, big applause, everybody, a really big impact. And I must say, the same night already, somebody came up to me and he said, listen, I am an investor. He wanted to shake my hand and he said, I want to invest in your company. And how did it feel for you when you saw these people enjoying your gym? Very exciting. That kind of feedback is everything for me. I always say it's my baby, you know, it's like, it's very personal.

4:13When you create something new, when you start a business of your own, it's part of your life. And the same night also, Julie said, Stefan, this looks very good. This is going to be a success. I'm going to get your money.

4:25Olivia Lee:Stefan says that a few days later, Julie comes to him with an offer. Let me help you get investment, she says. For a fee. 5 ,000 euros a month. She was very enthusiastic about, OK, this is going to work, you know. She was convinced and she told me literally she was convinced. This kind of investment is a huge risk for Stefan. But he says Julie's enthusiasm persuades him it's worth it. They start working on his business plan, tweaking the company's projections. According to Stefan, Julie spends the whole time promising him that she'll land a big investor. She comes up with names. Oh, I'm in contact with Dr Utker, you know, this big company in Germany.

5:05Olivia Lee:The frozen pizza company. Yeah, she says, like, this would be the ideal investor in your company. It's going to be hard to get him in, but we're going to work on it. We're going to do it, Stefan. And did she make you believe that together you could do it? Yes, yes. There was no reason to doubt. Then he says he gets a phone call. From this guy, who he was at the seminar, and he said, listen, Stefan, I've been talking to Julie, and I decided I want to invest in your company. So that was a very exciting moment, you know, like finally, OK, there's somebody who really wants to invest. The investor tells Stefan they've sent 25 ,000 euros to Julie's company.

5:43Olivia Lee:But, according to Stefan, Julie says the money isn't ready yet. The contracts need to be written out well, the due diligence, She's still arranging paper. So he waits. Every two weeks or every 10 days, an email from me claiming for him, can we have more explanation? Then he waits. 25 ,000 is not near to the budget. You know, we agreed we were looking for half a million euro budget. This is a first step. And then, Stefan tells me, Julie stops responding to him. so Stefan tells me he does what he probably should have done the first time he met Julie Meyer he googles her what he finds shocks him stories of Julie not paying her staff her business is going into administration money disappearing huge sums owned to everyone from banks to cab companies and caterers Julie had also been sued by Farres & Co the royal family solicitors, trying to claw back nearly£200 ,000 in unpaid legal fees.

6:43Olivia Lee:She'd repeatedly failed to attend court hearings or submit required documents, and was later found in contempt of court, with the judge branding her selfish and untrustworthy. Warwick University removed her honorary doctorate too, yet incredibly, none of this seemed to have stopped her. Stefan, in his desperation for the money, had been sucked in by Julie's charm and enthusiasm. He'd spent thousands chasing that dream investment. That's very hard for us because we are a really small company and every penny counts. We can't lose money. Not only that we lose that money also, but it's also mentally very hard.

7:23Olivia Lee:Stefan never sees the€25 ,000 investment. It just disappears.

7:33Olivia Lee:And how much did this whole experience impact your business? I would say very badly in the sense that up till today, I'm still looking for investment. People with money don't think about you. They only think about their money. And they can say yes today and they can say no tomorrow. It depends how they wake up. And how do you feel about Julie now? Honestly, I hate her. I'm sorry to say this, but I really feel robbed. Can you imagine somebody robs your house and you come back and you open the door? What you feel at that moment, that's what I feel. I feel robbed in plain daylight. How can you hurt people in that way?

8:15How can you be so cold?

8:23Olivia Lee:Julie's MBE, her reputation, her charm all of it made people believe a simple story that Julie Meyer could turn your business into the next billion dollar company if you looked on her LinkedIn you wouldn't know about the court cases she'd lost the bad press you'd see her travelling Europe rooms full of investors, exciting businesses so many people like Stefan got sucked into that image Julie Meyer, MBE the entrepreneur's friend. So I've just woken up to an email from an individual. But the money at play was about to get even bigger. And someone was about to get on her tail. Wow, that's a lot of money.

9:05It's 2025 and Julie is living in Zurich in Switzerland. She's running an investment firm called Viva Investment Partners. but a lot of her time is still spent organising events that she's hosting around three to four times a year. I said this to people at the time. I said that is one of the best conferences. It was excellent.

9:27Olivia Lee:One of the attendees was Simon Davies. He is the CEO of Scarab Tech, a company that turns waste plastic into diesel. You might remember from episode one that Simon first encountered Julie when she was running First Tuesday. And in January last year, he was invited to be a speaker for her. It was very exciting. I was like, oh, look, it's come full circle. It's like I'm no longer at the crowd looking at this. It's a bit like, you know, 20 years later, you're invited to go talk at Julie Bayer's event. Excellent. Yeah, it was fun. And so, Olivia, how and when did they start working together, Simon and Julie?

9:58Simon goes to Zurich from Johannesburg. He has a really good time at this event. He said Julie's just as he remembered in the early days, you know, a great speaker, a great moderator. It was really well put together. I mean, there was lots of people that we were super interested to talk to. So that all went perfectly. Julie tells him, you know, I really like your business. It's great. And I want to raise money for you. So he tells me they get quite close over the next few months. I would be on calls with Julie at two in the morning, many nights. I think she really liked the business. I think she really liked the idea.

10:31She made you feel like you were doing it together.

10:33Olivia Lee:And what's she doing for him? Is she sort of acting as a kind of broker between potential investors and his company? Exactly. So they agree that she will be the lead investor for the next funding round for his company. It's like a vote of confidence. She did Skype. She did First Tuesdays. She got an MBE. Everyone's like, that's a cool lead investor. Here's the money. So Simon tells his existing shareholders that Julie Meyer is going to be the lead investor for our next round of investments. So with a new investor added, they end up sending about$200 ,000, believing that the money will then go to Simon and his company.

11:10That part of it was very quick. I mean, I raised$200 ,000 in four days. Julie was very happy. All the money was sent to the law firm in Switzerland that was doing the deal. And then Julie will raise the rest. In total, she wants to raise about$900 ,000 for Simon. That's the agreement.

11:28Olivia Lee:Simon was going to use any money raised to expand the production of his portable machines. And the aim was to put them in small South African villages to help them produce fuel. And at this point, did he know anything about Julie's bad press? So interestingly, he did come across the bad press. He actually discussed it with these investors and they disregarded it. It was like, well, you don't know the details of all these cases. Everyone has litigation and if you're operating at what we consider what Julie, these are sort of the kinds of things that you might expect to find. Another thing he said was that you also think about the surroundings you're in.

12:05You're a fancy ski resort, you're surrounded by really high quality people, you know that Julie's invited to these summits. And he's like, what's not to believe? This seems like a credible person.

12:16Olivia Lee:But Julie keeps pushing back the deadline for the round to close, all the while telling Simon that she's getting the money. At one point she says she's raised$750 ,000. It all felt like it had momentum and it's getting better and better. And then, of course, Julie pulls out. In a letter, Julie says that the investment round has failed, claiming that there are incomplete financial documents, problems with advisors to Scarab Tech, among other things, all of which means she won't be investing in Simon's company anymore. I think Simon at that point is very unclear. over what's happened. So he contacts Julie and he asks for the investors' money to be returned.

12:57Olivia Lee:So this was the$200 ,000 that he had independently managed to raise? Exactly. Exactly. I was disappointed on the run, but at least that's not the worst case scenario of, well, what happened to the money and that seems to be OK. Simon waits for the investors to get their money returned. But then Julie sends him an invoice for around$200 ,000 in success fees, corporate infrastructure fees and management fees. The thing is, Simon says he never agreed to pay for any of these services. He thinks the money should have been returned to his investors. It was their money. But he says Julie had walked off with it.

13:34Olivia Lee:The money was gone. My heart sank. I was like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. I still had some outside hope that maybe she'd made an error. But no, there was no error. and the worst thing that could possibly happen is actually the thing that happens. And what happens with the money then? It essentially goes missing. Simon gets no money, the investors don't get their money back, so they don't know where it went. This is the last time she wrote to me. Simon, against my doctor's orders, as I'm in the hospital right now, I'm writing to you as I want you to understand my firm's position on the actions you have been taking, which are very disappointing.

14:13You will be held accountable for the damage that you do. We will act swiftly and unequivocally to protect our position. I hope you choose your actions very carefully. I regret very much that I tried to help you in your firm. This has been a huge disappointment to me and my team. That was the last message from Julie. When she's involved with your company, she's involved with your company. That wasn't fake. It was true. That's why I find it so hard to reconcile. It just seems entirely so unnecessary. I mean, that's the part I don't understand. And it's like, she could totally do this job. I don't know why she just doesn't do that.

14:51He introduced these investors to Julie. He told them that their money would be safe. It's jeopardized his relationship with these shareholders. He said at one point his business was at risk of bankruptcy. But, you know, more than anything, Simon wants answers. It's been a long time since Julie's had a big win with the company. So she works for that. But if it doesn't work, she's got the insurance policy of knowing she can just take the money anyway. You have to be a psychopath to talk to me in the way that she's talking to me. And then, but knowing that none of it means anything and she's really taking the money.

15:21Like, just, I, wow, then you're, then you're stone cold. I don't think she's quite that stone cold.

15:32Olivia Lee:Later in 2025, Julie Meyer lost the one thing that mattered most to her, her MBE. Following her contempt of court judgment, it was revoked for, quote, bringing the honours system into disrepute. while the amount of investors' money people say has disappeared gets bigger. Coming up, we head to Switzerland to get some answers.

16:05I've just woken up. It's about 6.30am. I'm in Zurich. I'm just in my hotel room. It's pretty dark outside. You can see one or two commuters, but apart from that, there's not a lot of people around.

16:20Olivia Lee:It's early January and Olivia has recently arrived in Zurich. She's there with Juliette Garside, the Guardian's European Financial Affairs Editor. The pair have been working on this story closely from the beginning and they're in the city to speak to Julie Meyer. They know she's here because she's hosting an event in the city and they want to ask her for a sit-down interview. I've been thinking about this moment for a really long time. This might just be our one chance. Oh, OK. Yeah, I've got to get ready now. They leave their hotel and they head towards Julie's apartment. It's cold, four degrees outside.

16:59You can see a sprinkling of snow in the fields. We're in the old town. We're looking out over the Linmat River and there are swans. Oh, gorgeous. And there's a kind of pontoon going into the water with Venetian candy-striped poles. They get to the apartment and wait a few hours. At one point, there was a woman that left the building and she was smoking a cigarette. Someone that knows Julie told us that she doesn't smoke, so we don't think that was her. We might have to think of plan B now. After that, we went to her offices. We were like, OK, maybe she left her apartment earlier, then we arrived.

17:37There's like pictures of her on the wall. Oh, are there? Yeah. Picture of her getting her honorary degree. Yeah, I think that's the PhD, yeah.

17:46Olivia Lee:Just a reminder, Julie had her honorary doctorate removed in 2022. Yeah, so the shutters in the middle room, which is apparently the room in which the event takes place, are now shut. And then we decide, OK, look, you know, we've been out for five, six hours walking around in the freezing cold. I think we should just go back to the hotel. It's disappointing not to have seen her just now. Yeah, I feel a bit flat, to be fair, because I think I had loads of adrenaline this morning. Yeah. I really thought we would see her. As we're going back to the hotel, we're like, OK, well, there's no harm in kind of walking around, you know, the area of her apartment one last time.

18:25So we're just kind of mindlessly walking kind of through a square. But then? We see her. Come on, let's do it. Junie Meyer, and it's unmistakably her. It was definitely her. She was wearing a leopard print jacket and a fur hat. She looked very glamorous. She's got these black sparkly trousers and she's wheeling along a shopping trolley. Which slightly kind of contrasted with the rest of the look. Yeah, didn't quite all fit together. I think it was just a few minutes, but it felt like hours. It really did. Time moved very slowly. She's coming out. She's coming out. And then we approach her. Excuse me.

19:08Are you Julie Meyer? No. Hello. We're from The Guardian. I'm sorry. This is being recorded. You can see the microphone. We just wanted to ask you about your MBE. It's been revoked. Why is that? I'm not who you think I am. I'm doing some shopping here. Could you please get out of my way? Thank you. We've heard the allegations. a lot of people have a lot of questions unpaid wages unpaid staff young people hopes and dreams a lot of investor money's gone missing money that should have gone to start-up companies where is the money, Julie? are you going to pay it back? could you please send me your own?