Inside the lavish lives of the billionaire family behind Boohoo, the fast-fashion giant called out in an investigation into workers being paid just $4 an hour at suppliers' factories

Mahmud Kamani (L) is photographed with rapper Snoop Dogg, business partner Carol Kane, and his son, Samir.Photo by Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for bohooo

• Boohoo is the UK's fast-growing fast-fashion retailer that was set up in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and his business partner Carol Kane and is now valued at more than $4.3 billion.
• The company has come under intense scrutiny this month after a Sunday Times investigation found that a factory supplying its clothes was paying workers as little £3.50 ($4.37) an hour and flouting COVID-19 social distancing rules.
• The company said it is investigating the report and described the conditions as "totally unacceptable."
• Here's the story of Kamani, the man behind the empire, and his glamorous life with his wife and three sons.

The rise of the Kamani family is frequently described by the British tabloids as one of the UK's great "rags to riches" tales.

Mahmud Kamani, the patriarch of the family, is the 55-year-old billionaire behind Boohoo, the UK's fast-fashion clothing company that has achieved explosive growth in the past few years and is considered to be one of the few retailers to have dodged the retail doom and gloom.

Kamani, who is now one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country and has worked his way up the UK's rich list to be worth just over $1 billion, started his career by selling cheap clothes to market stallholders and high-street brands in the UK (including H&M and Primark).

He went on to set up Boohoo with cofounder and designer Carol Kane in 2006, with the idea of cutting out the middle man and selling directly to customers online.

From the start, Boohoo's business model was based around being ultra-fast and ultra-cheap; around 3,000 new styles are added each week across its core brands with an average price point of $17.

The human cost of its fast and cheap business model has come under intense scrutiny this month after a Sunday Times investigation found that workers in factories making its clothes in the UK were being paid as little as £3.50 ($4.37) an hour.

The company is now investigating this report and said that these factory conditions were "totally unacceptable" and "fall woefully short" of its standards.

Here's more about the family behind the empire: