“After a basketball league founded by the rapper-actor and Jeff Kwatinetz ran into rough seas, the pair filed a $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit against two lead investors, who now assert that the whole thing is a Bannon-orchestrated “anti-Qatari smear campaign.”,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Rapper/actor Ice Cube and a business partner, a “Hollywood executive,” Jeff Kwatinetz co-founded the idea of “BIG3,” a half-court basketball league. Kwatinetz, a Harvard graduate-turned talent manager is the owner of the The Firm, Prospect Park and Overbrook Entertainment production companies.
The “3” in BIG3 refers to the fact that each team fields three players, not five. Games are played on a half-court, with two- and three-point shots, but also a four-point zone; the first team to reach 60 points wins. NBA legends including Allen Iverson, Julius Erving and Gary Payton coach and play on teams like the Killer 3’s and Ball Hogs, each with a roster of former pros, which means a potentially large built-in fan base. The first season kicked off in June 2017 with four games at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, each attended by 15,000.
After the first game debuted, BIG3’s president, NBA player Roger Mason Jr., introduced Kwatinetz to two men, Ayman Sabi, “a Palestinian-American raised in North Carolina” and his “business partner” Ahmed al-Rumaihi, “a former Qatari diplomat, who until March 2017 ran Qatar Investments, an arm of the Qatar Investment Authority, which controls hundreds of billions of dollars,” to discuss becoming investors in BIG3.
Kwatinetz alleged Sport Trinity failed to “fulfill their contractual obligations” and the investors alleged there was “never any basic corporate structure” and that Kwatinetz “misled them about the league’s finances.” Kwatinez admitted in court filings, saying, “his accountant “fucked up a lot of stuff” and “cost us $5 million from Qatar,”” according to THR.
The case worsens and multiple executive members leave the BIG3 firm “and are backing the investor’s version of events,” after Kwatinetz names himself as CEO last fall, making it so “everything bottlenecked to him” so that “none of the executives had any power or range to do anything,” according to Kai Henry, Kwatinetz long-time friend and former chief marketing officer.
Al-Rumaihi and Kwatinetz get into a “minor physical altercation” with “shoving and finger-pointing,” Kwatinetz alleges al-Rumaihi threatened his life.
A department of the nation state Qatar, “the chief investment instrument of the Qatari government” is now in a legal dispute with an American basketball team.
Al-Rumaihi, for his part, recollects the hike, on a steep trail in Topanga Canyon, but says no such conversation ever occurred. In fact, al-Rumaihi says that it was Kwatinetz who offered to introduce him to Bannon, saying the connection would be a “game changer” for the Qatari. “He refused to address his failed promises and mismanagement and he also repeated a recommendation he had made many times that we get Steve Bannon on the ‘payroll’ to assist Qatar,” al-Rumaihi said. Henry says he doubts Kwatinetz’s version of events. “The only time Ahmed talked about Bannon to me was in response to Jeff mentioning Bannon,” he says.
And then, things got really, really weird. Really.
Bet you did not see that one coming.
This is now. And then, things got ……. totally weird.
The businessman, who currently lives in Los Angeles, also retained a DC lobbying group for $2.5m on behalf of the Qatari government, US government documents show.
Ashcroft Law Firm LLC, run by former US Attorney General John Ashcroft, declared in June last year that they had a contract with the Qatari government, represented by al Rumaihi.