- The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic initiative launched in 2010 by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates along with Warren Buffett as a way for the ultrarich to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes, has booted an accused fraudster from its ranks.
The Giving Pledge, the charitable donor network connected to the Gates Foundation, has just ousted one of its members.
The erstwhile member is Arif Naqvi, a financier best known for founding Abraaj Group, a now-collapsed private equity firm based in Dubai. A spokesperson for the Giving Pledge confirmed Naqvi’s removal from the group—which is voluntary to join—to the New York Times on Wednesday morning.
The Giving Pledge, which was launched by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett in 2010, counts some of the richest people across the globe as members. Naqvi, whose firm at its peak controlled $13.6 billion in assets, was among the wealthiest businessmen in the Middle East before a dramatic fall from grace that led to his arrest and fraud charges in 2019.
Naqvi’s is the third forced removal the Giving Pledge has executed since its founding. He was preceded only by Sam Bankman-Fried, the imprisoned founder of crypto exchange FTX, and Denny Sanford, a billionaire who was investigated for possession of child sexual abuse material.
Naqvi’s name was removed from the Giving Pledge website’s list of signatories without any official announcement, the Times reported. He joined in 2013.
“We can confirm that Arif Naqvi is no longer a member of the Giving Pledge community,” a Giving Pledge spokesperson told Fortune. “Mr. Naqvi was removed from the Giving Pledge in May 2024, in accordance with the spirit and intention of the Giving Pledge community.”
Representatives for the Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and Fortune was unable to reach Naqvi.
A slow unraveling
Naqvi ran the Abraaj Group from its founding in 2002 through his resignation in 2018. The fund group was established with backing from various Middle Eastern power players, including royals. Naqvi called himself an “impact investor,” meant to describe an investment strategy that generates profits with a positive effect on social justice, health care, and the environment.
As Naqvi quickly amassed capital and climbed the ranks in the charitable giving space, he came to know Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. Gates was a guest of honor at a 2012 dinner Naqvi hosted at his home in Dubai, according to a book about Naqvi called The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale.
“Bill and Arif had much to discuss,” authors and Wall Street Journal reporters Will Louch and Simon Clark wrote. “They agreed that their charitable foundations would work together on a family planning program in Pakistan. Arif seemed to be precisely who Bill was looking for. He was wealthy and concerned for the poor.”
The Gates Foundation invested $100 million in Naqvi’s Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund “to supposedly invest in hospitals and clinics in emerging markets,” the authors added, saying that the crucial Gates investment “helped Naqvi attract $900 million more from other investors.”
At the time of the deal, Gates called the partnership “an example of the kind of smart partnerships that hold huge promise for the future.”
But Naqvi’s firm was “secretly siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from its healthcare fund and other funds to pay for Mr. Naqvi’s lavish lifestyle and expenses and salaries at the firm, according to the U.S. government’s case, the Dubai financial regulator’s investigation and company and investor documents,” Clark, one of the coauthors, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2021.
In 2017, Naqvi faced a string of allegations, including that he took around $780 million from investors’ funds. The allegations stemmed from an anonymous email an Abraaj staffer sent to the fund’s investors warning them about the founder’s actions.
Soon, a fund manager at the Gates Foundation, began asking Naqvi questions about the status of their investment, and reportedly received minimal answers. The Gates Foundation brought in a forensic accounting team to track the funds at Abraaj, the authors wrote, according to a write-up of the book by the New York Post.
Naqvi was arrested a year later and has since been fined by the financial regulator of Dubai, where Abraaj was based, and been sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for defrauding investors. He has denied any wrongdoing, and his case is still ongoing.
