Jimmy no mates

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Jim Morrison, CEO of Gulf telco player i-mate, says his company’s collapse was the result of fraud rather than the competition presented by BlackBerry and iPhone. Not everyone agrees. Here he talks for the first time about what went wrong.

Jim Morrison is in a stinker. He’s in Scotland, it’s raining, and the company he has spent the better part of a decade building in Dubai has just gone “belly up”. He says his company’s demise is the result of a massive fraud, others say that it’s the inevitable end of the road for a defunct business model. Whichever it is, Morrison is down $6m of his own cash, and in no mood for small talk.

“This is the first time in my life I have ever wanted to murder someone,” he says bitterly in his thick Glaswegian brogue. “Eight years of my life I put into this.”

Morrison’s firm i-mate makes smartphones, those phones that don’t just let you talk and listen and text, but act as mini-computers. Back in 2001, when Morrison left British Telecom to set i-mate up in Dubai, BlackBerrys weren’t available in the Gulf and the iPhone existed only in the fevered dreams of the most creative genius at Apple. In those days, the Middle East pickings were rich for i-mate.

Nokia — which Morrison refers to as “the 40 pound gorilla” — was king of the smartphone market back then, and its presence in the Gulf was considerable, but i-mate was free to pick up any customers Nokia left behind. According to Morrison, in 2006, at its peak, i-mate sold 200,000 handsets in the Middle East alone. “This year we would have been lucky if we had sold 40,000,” he says.

He’s adamant, however, that the downward sales curve is not to blame for the collapse of i-mate’s UAE operations, nor is the arrival into the market of BlackBerry and the iPhone. He won’t even lay the blame at the door of the global economic crisis.

“You could say the company is worth nothing now. At its height, three years ago, it was worth $750m. I would say the downturn had nothing to do with our failure. It’s quite simple: if you know you’ve got no cash in Dubai, you’ve got a very limited period in which to get cash. And if you can’t, all of your creditors come knocking on the door and that is it. If I had the cash, or I had another month or two months to get the cash, I would have been okay. So it is not to do with the recession, because we had corrected from the recession,” he says.

And why did i-mate have no cash? Fraud, says Morrison, plain and simple: a $15m fraud he alleges was committed by a senior board member while he was away in America. He says he knows who stole his money, that it took place since February this year, and that he will never get the money back.

It is probably prudent at this point for Arabian Business to point out that as the magazine went to press, no one at i-mate had been charged by the police with fraud of any sort.

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