Bashar Issa

How many years would it take to amass a group of property companies spanning China, the Middle East, Europe and America? For Bashar Issa, looking back on the time taken to build such an empire does not cover 50, 60 or 70 years. All this has been done before his thirtieth birthday.
Yet the man behind such heady activity is as laid back and relaxed as he is fiercely ambitious. His friends are musicians and artists, rather than surveyors and bankers, and he avoids the claustrophobic networking scenes of any of his adopted cities, with confident indifference.
Born into wealth from both parents’ sides in Kuwait (his mother is Kuwaiti, his father Iraqi), Issa, the youngest of three, grew up speaking the language of money more than his brother and sister. He claims his mother could only teach him to count by putting currency in front of the numbers, and that when she would fly back from London, studying for her masters at Hammersmith Hospital, he would sell the chocolates she gave him to his cousins.
‘It is very difficult for a child to be half something and half something else. The society in Kuwait was trying to identify itself as a separate country, so they were very precious about being Kuwaiti. It was and remains a very nationalist state with a nationalist society. This filtered down to the school and made for a lot of racism. That was very much a battleground for a child.’
His mother took her three children with her to London at the start of the 1990s and a brief spell at a school for Arab expatriots outside Bath was brutally halted by the first Gulf War when the family bank accounts were frozen in war-torn Kuwait. Issa and his brother spent an incongruous year in a state comprehensive in Kilburn, central London, to keep the bills down..........