The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been front-page news in the United States, and that’s as close as most Americans have come to the disease.
But for the fortune-hunting chief executive of a little-known L.A. company, Ebola has had a very real, if non-life-threatening, impact.
Tony Khodadad, chief executive of Leone Asset Management, said his business had secured licenses to mine precious metals and granite as well as raise lemongrass in the West African country of Sierra Leone.
But those plans have been put on hold as the disease has spread through the country, including Freetown, its capital, where Leone Asset maintains an office.
The country’s economy has virtually ground to a halt this year due to the Ebola outbreak, causing Leone Asset to announce in August that it was suspending all operations in the country.
Khodadad said he was just lucky to get out before he had real reason to worry about the virus.
“I returned before October,” he said. “I was lucky.”
Still, his money stayed there – and he claims astronomical returns await him if he can get operations back up and running.
Khodadad said his company invested more than $1.2 million in various operations in Sierra Leone, with some of the money coming from him and other money coming from partners he would not name.
The financial status of Leone Asset remains unclear. Its thinly traded over-the-counter stock is listed at a nickel, and it hasn’t filed financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission since a predecessor company in an unrelated business filed an annual report in 2010.
In 2012, Leone Asset, then known as Sloud Inc. and based in Panama City, Fla., announced that it had acquired various rights to diamond and gold mines in the country. The company changed its name last year, and followed with announcements of more of deals in the coastal country of 6 million.
In January, Leone Asset said it had a memorandum of understanding to operate an 89-acre granite quarry, which the company claims is worth in excess of $800 million. The next month, it announced plans to acquire the lease for 400 more acres of granite quarry.
Then there’s the 5,000 acres of lemongrass fields Leone Asset said it has access to through a subsidiary. Lemongrass seed oil is used in pesticides and preservatives as well as soaps and herbal remedies.
The company’s website said it expects to plant all of the acreage by the end of next year and that each acre will generate $40,000 in profit annually – as much as $200 million. Still, Leone Asset so far has little to show for its efforts. Khodadad said the company’s diamond mines have either broken even or lost money, and the company has yet to collect on its other investments. There are no public records available here to confirm that status.
Blown deals
Khodadad turned his efforts to Sierra Leone after the failure of a business much closer to home.
In late 2008, he purchased a Woodland Hills carwash located off the 101 freeway for $5.2 million, he said. But the business didn’t do well, his lender foreclosed in 2011 and Khodadad lost his entire investment.
That year, another Khodadad business, Sycamore Ventures, approached the owner of Precise Memory, an Irvine computer hardware manufacturer, offering to buy the company with shares of the penny stock company.
A press release issued in June 2011 quoted Khodadad, as Sycamore’s chief executive, saying, “We intend to help them grow their business and further develop their brand across traditional marketing and social media platforms.”
But the deal fell through when Precise Memory’s owner, Joseph Cohen, countered and asked for cash.
In a phone interview last week, Khodadad denied any connection to Sycamore.
Around the same time, Khodadad took over at Sloud, which also began announcing deals. In a 2012 announcement, Sloud said it was acquiring rights to bring digital kiosks to parts of India, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, where they could be used as remote banking outposts. Khodadad was quoted in a press release saying he expected the kiosks to be available in India by the end of that year.
Similar to the other deal, Khodadad’s representatives offered penny stock shares as payment to the kiosk company, Blow Me Away Media Corp. of Corona, but when the owner of the business countered that he wanted cash, the deal never got done.
In the interview, Khodadad said he didn’t have anything to do with that deal either.
Khodadad said that he became keen on Sierra Leone a few years ago after a friend brought him there with an opportunity to buy gold in that country for export. He saw an opportunity to operate granite quarries as the country is in need of granite to build new roads.
Khodadad said he had as many 200 people working for him in Sierra Leone within the past year but he had to let them all go.
Still, he plans to start his operations back up once the Ebola situation is contained. In the meantime, he said he’s working on another deal.
“My goal is to merge with another company,” he said.
