This is eerily similar to a job I had. I also worked for a young asshole CEO called Andrew, with multiple rubbish businesses, pretending to have more money than he had, having no idea what he was doing, and faced jail time a few years after I left. If you replace "property market" with "education sector" and "UK" with "Australia" we could have almost written the exact same article. I wonder how many of these companie…
My first ever job, straight out of college in the UK, at 18 years old, was a Web Developer at an apprenticeship training business. The structure of the business was that it was a "training provider" for web development, design and a few other things.
Rather than go to college or university, kids (usually around 16 years old) would go to this company to get "on the job" training. The company was accredited by a university, such that on completion of the "course", students would receive some sort of BTEC certificate, which is similar to a TAFE course in Australia.
A requirement of "training providers" is that they provide the tutoring to the students in order to obtain the BTEC, but must also place the students into businesses for around 50% of the course time to receive their "on the job" experience. The student must have received a certain number of hours of experience at a real web development company to obtain the proper certificate from the uni.
This training provider took on about 200 students a year into their web development course. Now it's impossible to place that many students with real web development companies. But for each bum on a seat, the company received a sizable chunk of cash from the government apprenticeship scheme, so it was important to get as many through the door as possible.
To solve the issue, the director of the training company (a guy I'll call Fred) who very much matches the description of other middle-aged "pretending to be rich" guys), spun up a series of fake companies for each course, such that he would place the students in his own companies to get their "on the job" hours. Each of the companies had it's own office, but usually attached to the same main building, and some in some random industrial estates without signage.
The web development company was the one I was hired in. The salary was just about enough for me to fill my car up and drive there from my parents house every day. Our "clients" at the web development company were all other businesses owned by Fred. Each of those businesses didn't seem to have any clients of their own, the whole web of businesses was driven purely from the training grants being generated by the main training company.
I worked there for a year and it was a very strange experience. Half of the time I was tasked with coding up websites for the web of businesses and doing odd jobs for Fred's friends (I remember spending a month building a website for a youth football team). The other half of my time was spent "tutoring" the apprentices who were in my office for 50% of their course. That mostly involved giving them "briefs" for clients which didn't exist, getting them all to code up their own version and add it to their portfolio.
I didn't have a boss at the web development company. On paper, I was the only full-time employee.
About a year after I left in 2012, I saw on the news that the training company had folded, because the university had caught on to what was happening, and stopped their funding. The entire network of businesses now seems to have been wiped from existence.