According to Dave Webster, chairman of 79th Group, the UAE has become a major worldwide commercial centre due to its tax environment and history of strict regulation.
“The UAE’s ease of doing business policy is appealing to a company like ours, as we seek to provide certainty to our investors by locating in the world’s leading jurisdictions.” Our customer service is at the heart of our operations; we take pleasure in being available to give an industry-leading customer experience to all of our investors. “As we continue to grow and expand our operations abroad, we believed it was vital to establish a new office base in the Middle East to connect with our overseas clients and provide a top degree of customer care to both domestic and international investors,” said Webster.
“After 30 years in real estate and over 10 years investigating and finding mining concessions, we have seen recurrent patterns within the local and international economies, which has enabled our approach of purchasing cheap distressed assets and adding value to each of these assets.”
Webster co-founded the 79th Group, an asset management firm based in the United Kingdom, with his sons Jake and Curtis Webster. The firm specialises in the acquisition, management, and development of profitable assets in the real estate and natural resource industries.
The company now owns 17 mining concessions in Guinea, three of which are being explored by world-renowned geologists, SRK Exploration. This is joined with four real estate developments around the UK to create a portfolio of assets worth more than £1 billion.
“We have a solid track record of capital repayments and interest payments to our investors, with many of these payments made during the Covid-19 outbreak, when many asset-management companies failed to pay their investors.” We can pay our investors because we have a wide portfolio of assets that we buy when they are significantly cheap and then apply our expertise to enhance value for our investors and the business.”
Webster, who owned and managed huge properties in the UK, decided to journey into Guinea and buy gold with the intention of selling it for a profit. It became clear to him that there were parallels between the real estate and natural resources sectors in terms of asset value behaviour during periods of economic uncertainty, and that skills in dealing with real estate assets could also be applied to the natural resources industry.
“We were eager to identify and capitalise on these prospects, and we spent a significant amount of time on the ground researching and meeting with the relevant people.” We’ve created a lot of connections on the ground in Guinea with local people and leaders, and we’ve built a good working knowledge of the extraction process, which has finally positioned us to become concession owners rather than merely purchasing natural resources,” Webster said.
The organisation now raises funding using loan notes, in which they loan money from their investors to a specific project within the portfolio, and they are paid back at an industry-beating interest rate. The firm has launched a fully regulated Experienced Investor Fund based in Gibraltar, in which investors pay to own stock within a ‘cell’ that is subsequently allocated to a variety of our natural resource and real estate assets.
“Our primary goal is to add value to people we engage with by leveraging our considerable experience to embrace and develop exciting investment prospects while capitalising on our existing relationships.” We are able to establish more – jointly – by working closely with our stakeholders and partners,” he stated.
“Investing in the areas in which we operate is a critical component of our asset management company’s ethos.” We value loyalty and respect for our fellow humans, wildlife, and the environment as a family-owned and managed business. That is why we never buy a property development or a natural resource concession without first giving something back to the community. Our team is developing plans for the purchase of an asset, as well as strategies for how we might support the local people, wildlife, and environment.”
The company recently launched the fully regulated Seventy-Ninth Experienced Investor Fund, with the goal of attracting experienced investors (both private and institutional) who want to gain exposure to profitable assets in the natural resources and UK property markets while maintaining an equity position in the fund. “By being domiciled and headquartered in Gibraltar, we provide our investors confidence that the jurisdiction in which we are based has a globally recognised regulatory framework,” Webster said.
