Mario Nawfal, an influencer who scored an interview with Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko that was published last week, makes hay of conversations with personalities in business and conservative politics but has been dogged by allegations of financial misconduct.
Lebanese-Australian Nawfal, 30, presents himself on the website for his “Roundtable” audio show on X as a “serial investor, global speaker and Web3 leader” — the last referring to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
His interviewees have ranged from Elon Musk and now-US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr to Andrew Tate, the self-described misogynist influencer.
Nawfal’s real-world influence is nevertheless hard to gauge, with multiple media and crypto experts contacted by AFP saying they were unable to comment on his output.
Based in Dubai, Nawfal first emerged as an online voice on crypto in audio broadcasts via X’s “Spaces” feature following the 2022 collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Today he attracts an average of around 200,000 live listeners to multiple weekly streams, according to analytics site spacesdashboard.com, claiming in his profile to host the “largest show on X”.
The site’s statistics showed Thursday that Nawfal was in fact some way down the rankings over the past seven and 30 days.
In X updates to his over two million followers, Nawfal’s posts focus on technology, business and conflict, often larded with alert emojis and occasionally drawing comment from platform owner Musk.
Away from business and news, Nawfal also posts about competing in the Dominican dance bachata, showing off the steamy style in videos posted to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
“Roundtable” stands for “citizen journalism” that “returns the power of information to the people”, Nawfal writes on his site, promising “truth and diverse perspectives”.
Speaking with expansive hand gestures to Lukashenko at the opulent Minsk presidential palace, he told the close Putin ally that his goal was to “bridge the gap between the East and the West”.
He had trailed the interview as an “unfiltered, unedited, no-holds-barred discussion” with “the longest-serving leader in Europe for over 30 years now”.
Lukashenko is also known as “Europe’s last dictator”.
He won a claimed 88 percent of the vote in a January election where most of his opponents were jailed or in exile, with some candidates picked to run against him actually campaigning in his favour.
The Belarusian leader expounded to Nawfal at length on his claims that Kyiv and the West were to blame for the conflict in Ukraine since 2014 and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Wearing a dark suit, open-necked shirt and close-cropped black hair, the influencer nodded along, rarely challenging or asking follow-up questions of Lukashenko.
Similarly, in a November conversation with Tate, Nawfal did not interrogate his interviewee’s allegations of corruption in the legal system of Romania, where he faces rape and human trafficking charges.
Nawfal has been the target of repeated allegations of shady financial dealings.
In 2015, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined his company Froothie — which sells blenders and other kitchen appliances — AU$10,800 ($6,800) for “a false or misleading representation” that it was offering money off certain products.
Christopher Zakrzewski, a YouTuber who goes by “Upper Echelon” online, said in mid-2023 that Nawfal was suing him for $11 million.
Zakrzewski had posted a series of allegations on his channel, including that Nawfal’s company IBC had carried out multiple so-called “pump and dump” schemes.
The term describes hyping new crypto assets only to sell them at the peak of the market, crashing the price.
Zakrzewski did not disclose the outcome of the lawsuit in a February 2024 video announcing it was over, saying only that he was “happy with the outcome”.
Meanwhile NBC News wrote in August 2023 that they had found several former business partners or investors who claimed Nawfal still owed them amounts over $10,000.
He denied the allegations in an interview at the time, admitting only that he had made mistakes and promising to pay people what they were owed.
Nawfal did not respond to questions AFP sent to him via multiple channels.
