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Paris (Agefi-Dow Jones) — Eiffage has not yet crossed the Rubicon, but it is steadily drawing closer. On Thursday 26 March, the construction and concessions group announced it had acquired an additional 1.74% of Getlink's share capital, bringing its total stake to 29.4% of shares and 29.5% of voting rights in the Channel Tunnel operator.

It now stands just a stone's throw from the 30% threshold that would oblige it to launch a full takeover bid on all Getlink shares.

Having first entered the capital in 2018, Eiffage became the company's largest shareholder in 2022 by acquiring the 13.71% stake held by TCI Fund Management. The group has since continued to buy shares: 1.76% of capital in 2023, 7.11% in October 2025, and now 1.74% on 26 March.

The muted market reaction — Getlink fell just 0.3% on Friday — suggests investors are not pricing in an imminent takeover bid. When Eiffage crossed the 25% threshold last autumn, it had moreover stated that it "does not intend to file a public offer for the remaining capital."

That commitment was not reiterated in the 26 March communication, but the company likely has good reason to wait at least another year before potentially launching a bid. The October acquisition of the 7.11% block included a clause requiring Eiffage to compensate the sellers if the group were to acquire further shares within 18 months at a price above the €17.70 paid at the time — i.e. through to April 2027. In this week's open-market purchases, Eiffage was careful not to exceed that price ceiling, with an average cost of €17.40 per share.

In the longer term, a full acquisition of Getlink could nonetheless make strategic sense for Eiffage. The group faces the expiry of its main concessions within the next decade: APRR and Area will end in November 2035 and September 2036, respectively. Last year, these generated €3.2 billion in revenue, representing 80% of its concessions business — which itself accounts for 16% of Eiffage's total sales and 65% of its operating profit.

In this context, Bank of America analysts, in a note published last January, expressed concern about the group's ability "to replace its expiring concessions (...) given the high prices of mature infrastructure assets on the market, as illustrated by the recent build-up in Getlink." At the current share price of the Channel Tunnel operator, purchasing the 70.6% of capital Eiffage does not yet own would cost it €6.8 billion, compared to the €2.5 billion already deployed since 2018 at an average price of €15.50 per share.

Facing similar challenges, France's other concessions giant, Vinci, announced this week the acquisition of motorways in India for €1.4 billion. Its main French networks, Cofiroute and ASF, will expire in 2034 and 2036 respectively. Vinci is nonetheless less exposed than Eiffage, notably thanks to its diversification into airports: last year, Vinci Autoroutes represented "only" 57% of concessions activities and 35% of the group's total operating profit.

Break out the oxygen masks. The number of breathless headlines is about to soar. SpaceX is expected to file its initial IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission any day now. It will be the confidential version, so we won’t get to see it. But what is usually a procedural nonevent for the public has turned into a carnival thanks to the sky-high numbers bankers are throwing around regarding SpaceX’s offering.

Last week, for instance, we scooped the news that SpaceX’s bankers were saying the company could try to raise more than $75 billion. That’s a bonkers number. All of the companies that went public in the U.S. last year raised $77.5 billion between them, according to Dealogic. (And that was a big increase on the $41.4 billion raised in U.S. IPOs in 2024.) And SpaceX isn’t the only company expected to go public this year.

As we reported separately last week, Anthropic is discussing an IPO as soon as the fourth quarter and bankers think the AI company could raise $60 billion. OpenAI’s IPO is also on the horizon. Is there enough money sloshing around in the market to supply all three in the same 12-month period?

Never say never. In 2021, the boom year fueled by ultralow interest rates, investors poured $316 billion into IPOs. Then again, we haven’t been in that interest rate environment since 2022. And if markets remain as volatile as they are now, at least one of these companies will likely be disappointed.

OpenAI and Anthropic at least have the benefit of phenomenal growth—Anthropic’s annualized sales more than doubled in the first two months of this year, according to our report last week. SpaceX is a different story. Details of its financial performance aren’t readily available, but Reuters has reported that revenue hit around $16 billion last year. In 2022, The Wall Street Journal has reported, SpaceX’s revenue was $4.6 billion. Those two numbers suggest a far more sedate level of growth than the AI firms are enjoying.

It also means SpaceX might have a hard time going public at the valuation of $1.25 trillion Elon Musk put on the company when he combined SpaceX with his xAI. It doesn’t help that the biggest source of SpaceX’s revenue is its Starlink satellite internet service, which is hardly the kind of business one associates with stratospheric valuations. (This story provides a broader reality check.) On the other hand, the Musk following among public investors is enormous. So nothing can be ruled out.

Even so, until investors can see SpaceX’s financial statements—which probably won’t be for a couple more months—we won’t know what a realistic valuation or offering size will be. Banker-driven hype ahead of an offering is standard, but lots can happen to upset bankers’ wishful thinking.

According to sources, French designer Léa Peckre — a winner of Hyères and ANDAM fashion prizes — is joining the French house.

IN THE SADDLE?: It looks like Hermès has recruited a notable design talent as it prepares to launch into haute couture.

According to sources, French designer Léa Peckre is joining the luxury giant. Her title and start date could not immediately be learned, but it is understood she is to work under Nadège Vanhée, artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear at Hermès since 2014.

Peckre recently wrapped up a five-year stint at Celine as design director of women’s rtw, her LinkedIn page details.

Before that, she designed a collection under her own name and staged several runway shows during Paris Fashion Week.

The graduate of famed Brussels fashion school La Cambre shot to fame in 2011 by winning the main prize at the International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyères.

Peckre also won ANDAM’s First Collection prize in 2015 and once designed a capsule collection for French lingerie firm Maison Lejaby.

Hermès has been teasing a foray into haute couture for more than a year. While discussing the company’s fourth-quarter results last month, executive chairman Axel Dumas confirmed the atelier is up and running, but he did not reveal a launch date or other particulars.

“What I saw was superb. I’m really quite excited, and I’m very proud of what the teams have done,” he said at the time. “We’ll be ready when we’ll be ready.”

Peckre could not be reached for comment and Hermès did not respond to a request for comment.

It is understood Grace Wales Bonner, the house’s next menswear creative director, is also in the midst of building out her design team ahead of her runway debut for Hermès in January 2027.

The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades

It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.

On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972. The launch window for Artemis II, as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.

Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.

“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September. “But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”

Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.

The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon. Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.

SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission.

Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it. The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.

After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.

Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.

Yes.

For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.

The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.

Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.

Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.

Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.

The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.

Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area. On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.

There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu. Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.

The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.

Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.

NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.

Analysis by the Journal finds four of the largest private-credit funds have more exposure to the software industry than their filings suggest

Many private-credit fund managers are playing down their exposure to software as fears spread about threats from artificial intelligence. A detailed analysis revealed four large funds marketed to individual investors by Apollo Global Management APO -1.42%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Ares Management ARES -1.52%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Blackstone BX -1.42%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Blue Owl Capital OWL -2.00%decrease; red down pointing triangle have more exposure to the software industry than their filings suggest.

Investors’ concerns about the industry’s software exposure helped prompt record withdrawals from private-credit funds in the first quarter. Fund managers contend that AI will affect each software company differently and that some will adapt or even benefit.

The Blue Owl Credit Income Corp. fund had nearly twice as much exposure to software as it reported, an analysis by The Wall Street Journal found, while the discrepancies for the other funds were smaller. On average, the four funds classified about 19% of their investments as software, while the Journal found their average software exposure to be about 25%.

Private-credit funds provide an industry breakdown of their loans to companies each quarter. Software is the biggest category for most of them. Methodologies for categorizing loans vary. Ares said in a filing that it adheres to the independent Global Industry Classification Standard, while others use different methods.

“The way in which [private-credit funds] classify their sector exposures is not uniform,” Barclays analysts said in a report Thursday about stresses in the private-credit market. “This sector ‘massaging’ generates concern from the investor community and makes it difficult to assess degrees of true diversification across funds.”

Private-credit funds say software companies that serve other sectors, such as healthcare, should be reported in those buckets because of their dependence on the industries. That approach predates the recent investor anxiety around software.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed the breakdowns in four of the largest private-credit funds, which make high-interest loans to companies. The Journal used sector tags from data provider PitchBook and its own analysis to identify software-focused companies within private-credit portfolios. It presented each of the fund managers with a list of loans to companies it identified as software companies that the funds didn’t identify as such.

The Journal found that the two funds that grew fastest in the cohort—those of Blackstone and Blue Owl—had more software exposure in other industry buckets. Some in the industry worry the funds’ rapid growth could hurt the quality of their portfolios. Private-credit fund managers depend heavily on a supply of loans from private-equity buyouts, which were concentrated in software companies over the past five years.

The Journal’s analysis found that:

As unease about AI replacement crushed the stocks of public software companies in recent months, some fund managers played down their concentration in the industry or turned the spotlight on competitors. The software companies in private-credit portfolios have higher debt compared with their earnings, on average, than companies in any other sector, according to a recent Morgan Stanley analysis.

“If you look at the private-credit deals that have gone sideways, there’s a software element to the majority of them,” said Alex Chaloff, chief investment officer at Bernstein Private Wealth Management.

Many private-credit fund managers say they believe that fears about software loans are overblown and that they feel good about the quality of their portfolios.

Blue Owl touted its technology investing chops for years and helped pioneer private-credit lending to SaaS companies. After the so-called SaaSpocalypse hit markets in January, the tune appeared to change.

“We’re not negative in any manner on software,” Blue Owl Co-CEO Marc Lipschultz told analysts on a conference call in early February, before pointing out that for the Credit Income fund “actually amongst the peer group, we have the lowest software exposure.”

Some fund managers have altered which companies they include in the category. One of the largest investments in Apollo’s fund is a $239 million loan to Anaplan, a self-described SaaS provider. But the fund recorded the loan as an IT investment for almost three years before changing it to software in March of 2025. The fund reclassified at least two other loans to software in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Even Disney’s Bob Iger signed on to the vision of allowing users to make their own videos starring Homer Simpson and Darth Vader. Then Sam Altman pulled the plug.

When Sam Altman arrived in Los Angeles to attend Vanity Fair’s Oscar afterparty earlier this month, his company was just weeks away from being able to license its Sora video-generation tools to Hollywood studios.

After the smash success of ChatGPT, Sora was hyped as AI’s next consumer-friendly frontier—a simple app that allowed users to put themselves and their friends in whatever video settings they choose, from dribbling like the Harlem Globetrotters to clashing lightsabers with Darth Vader.

Disney’s DIS -2.46%decrease; red down pointing triangle Bob Iger signed on to the vision, agreeing to have his company invest $1 billion in OpenAI and allowing the studio’s Marvel, Pixar and other characters to appear in Sora videos. Just as importantly, he put Disney’s valuable imprimatur behind the nascent technology amid widespread fears about protecting the industry’s creative work from AI.

Then OpenAI abruptly decided to shut Sora down.

Disney executives, many of whom learned about the decision less than an hour before it was announced, were shocked. What they didn’t know was that Sora had quietly turned into a liability for OpenAI in the months after its release, particularly as the startup tightened its focus ahead of a looming IPO.

OpenAI was weeks away from finishing work on a new AI model, code-named Spud, and needed to free up more computing resources to power the coding and enterprise products that would run on it. AI chips are the most precious commodity at any leading research lab, and at OpenAI, Sora was eating up far too many of them.

The product wasn’t profitable, and every user who spliced themselves into a World War II newsreel or Hollywood chase scene drew down a finite resource.

Sora now looks like an expensive strategic miscalculation, one that was led by key employees who were at the center of the AI talent war raging across Silicon Valley.

Altman represented the move as a difficult but necessary sacrifice toward the company’s larger goals, writing in a note to employees that he was encouraged by how they were willing to make “difficult trade-offs” for the good of the company.

The decision to kill Sora marked a stunning end to a project that Altman once dreamed would turn OpenAI into the creative pioneer of the AI era and could have been a lucrative new source of revenue.

The company first previewed Sora to the world two years ago, showing dreamlike landscapes conjured up by the technology that invoked the fantastical worlds of Hayao Miyazaki, or perhaps the surrealism of Salvador Dalí. When OpenAI launched a stand-alone Sora app for consumers last September, Altman likened it to the moment when the company first released ChatGPT.

But the app never took off in the ways its creators imagined—it was more AI slop than AI magic. Usage flatlined by the end of the year. With OpenAI’s purse strings tightening ahead of its IPO, company executives began taking a more critical look at Sora—and didn’t like what they saw.

The research team there was about to begin a training run for a new model meant to power video-generation in ChatGPT. Unlike language models, which learn from text, video models have to make sense of entire moving worlds, making them far more expensive to create. After running the numbers on how much it would cost, OpenAI decided to cancel it.

OpenAI expects to redirect its focus toward a new “superapp” the company is building that incorporates so-called agentic AI tools that can autonomously execute tasks for users, such as writing software, analyzing data and booking travel. Such productivity-focused products are becoming widely adopted in the workforce, and OpenAI has so far lagged behind its startup rival Anthropic in winning this market, imperiling its lead in the AI race.

Altman told staff the Sora team will now focus on longer-term bets such as robotics.

An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company is ruthlessly giving priority to its computing resources based on where it drives the most long-term economic value. “This disciplined focus on where we apply that compute allows us to grow, innovate faster, and deliver more efficiently to enterprises and developers,” she said.

Meta’s talent raid

Sora was the brainchild of Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles, two researchers who became close friends while completing doctorate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. The pair joined OpenAI in early 2023, and set their sights on building models that could simulate the physical world by creating high-quality video from text.

They previewed their research to the public in February 2024, naming the system they developed after the Japanese word for sky. Sora transfixed the tech world by creating seemingly realistic videos of everything from woolly mammoths trekking across a snowy field to a stylish woman walking down a Tokyo street filled with glowing neon signs. Altman asked users on X to submit text descriptions for Sora before sharing their creations.

That December, OpenAI released Sora to the broader public.

The company housed Sora under its world simulation team, led by Aditya Ramesh. The division worked separately from OpenAI’s core research team, which built the language models that powered ChatGPT.

Last spring, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a full-scale talent raid of OpenAI, personally reaching out to dozens of the company’s top researchers and luring them to join his new AI lab with giant pay packages. One of his targets was Peebles, who received an offer and briefly considered joining the company.

OpenAI managed to keep Peebles after giving him a raise, according to people familiar with the matter. Soon after, his responsibilities with Sora also expanded. Peebles oversaw training of a new video-generation model, and the creation of the Sora consumer app.

OpenAI’s researchers are able to track how AI chips are allocated between different groups through an internal dashboard. Some of them were surprised by the amount of computing resources the company gave to the Sora team, given that video-generation tools didn’t make much money, nor improve the capabilities of its language models.

Sora’s work was closely guarded from the rest of the company, leading some former employees to describe the project as a startup within a startup.

As the year progressed, there were growing signs that OpenAI was falling behind competitors in key parts of the AI race. Google’s Gemini grew popular with consumers. And Anthropic’s coding tool, Claude Code, was winning over software engineers across Silicon Valley thanks to its ability to write software programs without much oversight. OpenAI scrambled to release a new version of its own coding product, Codex.

But Altman wanted OpenAI to also be the AI company that used the technology to reshape popular culture and entertainment. In early 2025, he asked former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to informally consult a team inside OpenAI that was working on a separate social-media project similar to X, people familiar with the matter said. Altman also was working with then-Disney CEO Iger on a deal to enable the entertainment giant’s fans to bring their favorite characters to life with AI through Sora.

OpenAI previewed a version of the new Sora app to its employees in late September before releasing it to the public at the end of that month. The product garnered mixed reviews internally. Some employees felt launching a social-media app built around engagement would hurt the company’s brand. Others had concerns about the safety implications of allowing users to create AI-generated videos, even with guardrails.

Sora shot up to the top of the App Store in the week after its launch, despite an invitation-only user base. Users who made it found it to be a marvel: type in anything they wanted—Homer Simpson doing Riverdance—and a 10-second video of it would appear in a few minutes. And since the app allowed people to upload their own faces, they were suddenly making short, crazy films starring themselves. Altman himself volunteered his likeness, leading to absurd, sometimes violent or disturbing short films, that he didn’t seem to mind.

Since the copyright guardrails were fairly loose, videos soon appeared in the feed that pushed the boundaries of taste. A big featured player was Martin Luther King Jr., who could be instructed to share his dream of anything, from a new season of Fortnite to changing Sora’s content-violation policy. King’s estate complained about the images, leading the platform to announce that it had removed his likeness.

The worldwide user count peaked at roughly a million soon after the app’s launch, but never reached that level again. In the subsequent months, it dwindled to less than 500,000, according to data from Similarweb.

Sora was losing roughly a million dollars a day, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Disney’s AI dream

Still, OpenAI tried to find a way to make Sora work. In December, it announced a multiyear deal with Disney to license more than 200 characters from the entertainment giant’s cinematic universe. As part of the deal, Disney agreed to become a major customer of OpenAI and invest $1 billion into the startup.

In a CNBC interview, Iger said the deal gave Disney the opportunity to play a part in the fast growth of AI and new forms of media and entertainment. Altman said he hoped the partnership would give users a new way to be creative with AI.

For Disney, the deal represented proof that there was a business model for licensing its intellectual property for the use of AI. The day before it announced its deal with OpenAI, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google accusing the tech giant of “infringing Disney’s copyrights on a massive scale.”

In February, Iger said on an earnings call that short-form videos created with Sora would soon appear on the streaming service Disney+, which was preparing to launch a vertical video feed. Disney was also in talks with OpenAI to use ChatGPT across the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent weeks, OpenAI began piloting an enterprise version of Sora for companies like Disney to use with safeguards.

The tool, which Disney expected to introduce as soon as this spring, would have allowed select Disney executives to use Sora for everything from designing marketing campaigns to special effects without giving OpenAI access to the work.

But OpenAI was already looking at ways to pull back from Sora. The company fell further behind Anthropic, whose recent advancements stirred fresh fears that AI could supplant traditional software and services, briefly triggering a stock-market selloff. OpenAI realized it needed to put more resources into building these so-called productivity tools, and began looking at areas to deprioritize.

After initially planning to continue selling video-generation features through ChatGPT, the company decided to cut Sora altogether.

Disney’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI never went through, and its relationship with the company is effectively dormant.

Under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, Disney is in active discussions with more than a dozen partners about ways to implement other AI tools, according to a person familiar with the situation.

“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit from the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” Disney said in a statement. “We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it.”

On the X account for Sora, the team posted what felt like a digital eulogy. “To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you.”

Years of Western sanctions haven’t prevented money flows out of Tehran: ‘They probably learned from the Russian oligarchs’

On a leafy residential stretch of North London dubbed Billionaires’ Row, Saudi royals and wealthy Russians have long come shopping for high-end real estate. The Iranians were a more surprising addition to the neighborhood.

Several sprawling mansion plots along the thoroughfare more formally known as The Bishops Avenue make up a chunk of the extensive London property holdings funded by Iranian money that Western officials have linked to the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iranian banker Ali Ansari acquired the Bishops Avenue plots and other nearby property in 2018 for around 90 million pounds, equivalent to around $120 million today, according to people familiar with the deal. The transaction took place offshore through an entity registered in the Isle of Man, the people said.

Now frozen by British sanctions, the properties have fallen into disrepair, the overgrown lots a blight on an upscale street lined with manicured gardens and iron gates. Their desolation contrasts with hives of construction activity nearby, where cranes tower over designer redevelopments.

But they are nonetheless an illustration of how Iran has been able to move money internationally for years despite Western sanctions aimed at choking off the regime’s ability to do so.

The Middle East war has heightened scrutiny on the global financial networks alleged to fund the Iranian regime’s military, domestic oppression and foreign proxies. It is a web that Western officials say stretches from the United Arab Emirates to Toronto, Hong Kong and Singapore.

London has emerged a key part of that nexus. The proliferation of offshore vehicles, combined with a laissez-faire attitude toward sources of foreign wealth, have made it an attractive place for well-to-do Iranians to park cash, real-estate experts and wealth managers say.

“You name a jurisdiction where people have earned a lot of money through questionable means, it ends up in London property,” said Steve Goodrich, who leads research and investigations at Transparency International UK, focused on rooting out corruption.

London is hardly the lone destination for Iran’s dirty money.

The U.S. Treasury’s financial-crimes enforcement arm said last year it identified some $9 billion in potentially illicit Iranian money passing through foreign accounts at U.S. banks in 2024 alone, much of it oil and gas proceeds routed through accounts and shell companies in Asia and the Middle East. The U.S. has highlighted Iranian cash flows it says support arms purchases and bolster the ruling regime. Officials also cite outflows of personal fortunes belonging to connected Iranians, described as the spoils of classic kleptocracy.

Cryptocurrency analysts say they have tracked billions in Iran-linked outflows in recent years. In February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told lawmakers the U.S. had seen Iranian leaders “wiring money out of the country like crazy.”

London has stables of lawyers and accountants experienced at disguising sources of wealth and who help clients obtain visas that grease the wheels of business.

British anticrime officials and the financial-sector watchdogs estimated in 2024 that more than £100 billion in illicit money is laundered inside or through the U.K. every year. Government officials pledged to boost barriers to dirty money following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Ansari’s real-estate portfolio in the British capital includes a North London mansion that U.K. property records show cost him £33.7 million in December 2014. His name is also attached to two luxury apartments in London’s high-end Kensington neighborhood, purchased in 2014 and 2016 for a combined £36 million.

The apartments are just steps from the Israeli Embassy and the nearby royal residence at Kensington Palace. The proximity has prompted a spate of British media reports about security in the area and the potential for Iran to have monitored consular activities from close range.

Ansari’s close working relationship with senior regime officials “is a well-known secret in Iran,” said Farzin Nadimi, senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has studied Iran’s military and international flows of regime money.

The layers of shell companies and use of foreign conduits into luxury real estate help leaders of the Islamic Republic maintain an image back home of embracing modesty and rejecting lavish lifestyles, researchers say.

As for where the regime has chosen to move money, Nadimi said, “They probably learned from the Russian oligarchs that investing in London real estate was a good idea.”

London assets bearing Ansari’s name were frozen when the U.K. imposed sanctions in October 2025. British officials accused Ansari of financially supporting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the paramilitary group that protects the regime and serves as its dominant political and economic entity. A British minister in a government statement called Ansari a “corrupt Iranian banker and businessman.”

Ansari was the dominant shareholder in Iran’s Ayandeh Bank, a private lender that collapsed in late 2025. The failure helped trigger massive protests that turned deadly. He hasn’t been sanctioned in the U.S.

Ayandeh was run by regime cronies, The Wall Street Journal earlier reported, and sank under a multibillion-dollar pile of bad loans. In a statement in October, Ansari blamed the bank’s failure on “decisions and policies made beyond the bank’s control.”

Ansari, through a London lawyer, said he plans to challenge the U.K. sanctions and denied any financial relationship with the Revolutionary Guard. The lawyer also denied reporting by Bloomberg in January describing Ansari as an established money man working for Mojtaba Khamenei—who became Iran’s new supreme leader earlier this month—helping move oil proceeds and other business profits abroad.

Khamenei is the second-eldest son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the previous supreme leader, who was killed on the first day of the war in February. The newly elevated son was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2019.

Elsewhere, U.K. and overseas entities have been used to route Iran-linked cash into the European market, including into high-end hotels in Germany and Spain, corporate filings show.

A few minutes’ drive from Ansari’s Kensington apartments, a boutique London hotel called the Gainsborough Hotel sold for £6.5 million in 2018 to an entity controlled by Salim Ahmed Said, according to U.K. property records. The hotel, a short walk from world-renowned museums, is formed of conjoined Victorian townhouses with British and Irish flags displayed out front.

Said is an Iraqi-British national who since at least 2020 has operated a network of companies helping Iran dodge international sanctions on sales of oil, according to U.S. Treasury Department sanctions imposed in July 2025.

Robinbest Limited, a U.S.-sanctioned entity, is the Gainsborough’s registered owner and directly linked to Said, according to U.S. sanctions and U.K. property records. The records list a villa in Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah as his address.

Said, 48 years old, holds two British passports, one that expired this month and a second expiring in 2029, and has used several aliases, according to the U.S. Treasury. He couldn’t be reached for comment. Said has previously said his oil trades were legitimate.

Ansari, 57 years old, was born in Ghazvin, Iran, and holds four passports, two from Iran, one from Cyprus and the other from the tiny Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, a former British colony, according to an October U.K. sanctions filing. It lists Dubai as a primary address.

Ansari identified himself as Iranian and provided a Tehran address on early U.K. corporate filings, in 2007. Years later on filings tied to the mansion plots on Billionaires’ Row, he listed his nationality as Cypriot.

As a result of the recent sanctions, a developer who worked with both Ansari and previous owners of the North London properties has gone unpaid for work he did for the Iranian, according to people familiar with the relationship.

The plots sit vacant, with faded signs beside locked gates and security signs warning “Guard dogs in use. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”