27 April 2020 46.10 EUR

Now, if you ask Wissam how he is doing financially, he will feign offense and give you a long spiel about how he is a powerful millionaire and "will teach you a hard lesson about the meaning of power" if you argue with him. Which is what he did to me. Over e-mail. It was good for a giggle. I mean, here's a guy who works as a paralegal indiscriminately robbing and threatening people. Were he a lawyer, he'd lose his license over this sort of thing. But he's not, so his future in the legal profession largely depends on whether or not people continue to do business with him.

And so the reality of Wissam Mobayyed is very different from what he likes to project.

Wissam "owns" an apartment at 44 Boulevard J-F Kennedy, 1er étage, in Esch-sur-Alzette. By "owns" I mean has a mortgage on with a very high debt-to-equity ratio that he can barely afford, even though he has set up a complex tax dodge on all of his rental income. He rents this apartment out by individual rooms, via leasing and via Airbnb. I rented one with him with a short-term lease. I needed an apartment ASAP in the late spring and it was one of the few available. It was not exactly in great shape and I actually put a lot of effort into cleaning up and repairing the place.

There are several problems with Wissam's apartment. The Esch-sur-Alzette town administration have cited him for a bunch of code violations; but for them, it's like, what do you do with a guy like this? Do you take him to court, force him to repair the place to code standards and in so doing bankrupt him? Or do you just leave him alone? And the Esch-sur-Alzette administration are very nice and civilised people. So of course they leave him alone. Meanwhile, though, the place doesn't meet fire safety standards; the plumbing doesn't meet requirements; etc. Wissam literally rents one of the rooms in this apartment through Airbnb with a totally nonfunctional bathroom. None of the plumbing will drain. So if you rent it on Airbnb, and you decide to shit/shower/shave at some point, there is quite a high likelihood that you may in fact flood the entire apartment.

And - this brings me specifically to my problem with Wissam - he habitually commits premeditated thefts against each and every one of his tenants by accusing them of causing 8000 euro worth of sanitation damage in this room, which he does not rent to normal tenants, at the end of their leases. And if you argue with him about these sorts of aggressive premeditated robberies he threatens to report you to police and sue you for 8000 euro to cover this pre-existing damage to a room that you may not have ever been inside of.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

It is unsafe to do business with Wissam. He is a criminal. People like Wissam leave Syria because in Syria his type of criminal isn't tolerated. They don't do well, commercially speaking, unless they are close to the Assad regime. But in Europe they are treated as protected victims by naive governments and allowed to continue their patterns of criminality against society.

I believe that Wissam is unsafe to rent with. I believe that any law firm he works for is unsafe to work with. And I believe that clients of Wissam's are at very clear risk. The attorney-client fiduciary relationship is a sacred one, and Wissam is a dangerous and unreliable link for both of those parties.