Bassim Haidar's boating career began on a five-metre outboard in the murky back creeks of Nigeria. The boat was owned by a friend and they'd cruise up the waterways on the weekends, spending Friday and Saturday nights sleeping in a waterfront hut-on thin mattresses if they were lucky - with no running water or electricity.
Today, Haidar has two yachts, excluding the 63.8-metre Codecasa he sold this year, and he supplements these with three fishing vessels based across the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Next on his to-buy list is an explorer, so he can venture even further afield. He files between destinations on his champagnecoloured plane -a Gulfstream 550 - and on land, he relies on a fleet of luxury cars to whisk him between his central London properties.
Haidar says his life now is the one he was destined to lead. Call it fate, call it luck or chalk it up to hard work, but Haidar insists that he imagined his success with such unshakeable, unwavering certainty that he wasn't in
