Wonga’s married millionaire ex-boss, 52, ‘dumped his wife for a wrecked Ukrainian refugee and moved in with his mistress’
- Haakon Overli, 52, from Surrey, is believed to have left his family home
- Millionaire investor actively lobbied politicians to help Ukrainian refugees
- The entrepreneur is a former director of the disgraced payday loan company Wonga
A disgraced former boss of the Wonga payday loan company is said to have abandoned his wife for a Ukrainian refugee.
Investor and dotcom entrepreneur Haakon Overli, 52, is said to have started a romance with the Eastern European woman after he took her to the family home in Surrey after the Russian invasion.
But the married millionaire has apparently left his wife Imogen Overli, an orchestra chairwoman, and moved in with his mistress, according to The sun.
Mr Overli is said to have lobbied the government to help bring Ukrainian refugees to the UK.
He also reportedly began weeks of lobbying Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel in March to speed up the process of bringing his current girlfriend to Britain.
Haakon Overli, 52, is said to have started a romance with the Eastern European woman after he took her to the family home in Surrey after the Russian invasion.
Mr Overli, is the former director of the disgraced payday loan company Wonga, which charged annual interest rates equal to 1,509%
Just months after the Ukrainian refugee was granted a visa, she and Mr Overli left the family estate in Surrey.
Mr Overli repeatedly tweeted his support for bringing Ukrainian refugees to the UK at the start of the Russian invasion in March.
Norwegian-born Mr Overli, who studied mathematics at the University of Oslo and also has an economics degree from Durham University, made his fortune in the early years of the dot com boom after founding the broker online Self Trade in 1997.
The company was launched in April 2000 and sold in October of the same year for over £900 million ($1.1 billion).
Mr. Overli has also worked for JP Morgan and as an investment banker at ING Barings.
He was also a director of controversial UK payday loan company Wonga for a year in 2008.
Norwegian-born Overli has been active on Twitter in support of the plight of Ukrainian refugees (refugee image from March 19 this year)
The company fell into administration in 2018, after being heavily criticized by politicians, including Labor leader Ed Miliband, as a prime example of ‘predatory lending’, having made loans to people who would never have been able to repay them.
Around 200,000 customers still owed a total of £400million when Wonga collapsed following a flood of compensation claims.
Activists accused the controversial firm of being a ‘legal loan shark’ and exploiting customers by offering small loans that quickly racked up astronomical interest rates that many struggled to repay.
Some customers were facing interest rates of up to 5,853% before government intervention, limiting rats to 1,500%.
Wonga also charged interest at annual percentage rates that amounted to 1,509 percent.
In the years since his time at Wonga, Overli co-founded Dawn Capital, which describes itself as the largest specialist B2B software investor in Europe.
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