A Finnish real estate company is planning to build a large data centre in southeastern Finland that will mainly serve social media platform TikTok. One of the company's main backers is Hussain Sajwan, a multi-billionaire from the UAE, who has previously partnered with US President Donald Trump, according to ForbesOpens an external website. Hussain Sajwan made his billions in real estate, particularly in Dubai. He collaborated with a Trump firm in 2012 on a Trump-branded golf resort in Dubai. At the beginning of this year, Trump announced at a public event that Sajwan's company was planning to invest nearly 20 billion euros in data centres around the United States. Sajwan met with the US PresidentOpens an external website at the White House in April. Sajwan was also seen in a photo posted on social media having breakfast alongside billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk. Sajwan is not known to have any previous business dealings in Finland. Yle asked the businessman for an interview, but a spokesperson from his investment company declined the offer, saying that Sajwani would not be commenting about the data centre project at this stage. Meanwhile, Finnish business paper Kauppalehti has reportedOpens an external website that the data centre project is also linked to the China-based IT services giant GDS Holdings. According to information obtained by Yle, one of the companies set up for the project has at least one Chinese owner. Firm(s) behind deal Finnish media reported last week that there were plans to build a TikTok data centre in Finland. On Tuesday, it was announced that the data centre would be built in Kouvola, a small inland city in the southeast with just over 78,000 residents. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. A press release about the project from a Finnish real estate company called Hyperco said that TikTok would be the chief user of the planned data centre. The company explained that it would be the centre's owner, while TikTok would be a tenant. Hyperco is also leading the centre's construction effort. Founded in 2020, Hyperco has had relatively modest turnover since then — around 1.3 million euros in the last fiscal year. While Hyperco was founded by a group of Finnish businessmen, details about the company's ownership were revealed after its general meeting last month — a UK company called Astral Star Holding Company Limited is listed as the firm's sole owner. Listed as the sole owner of Astral Star is Hussain Ali Habib Sajwani — the billionaire's full name. However, the arrangement is even more complex than that. While Hyperco's press release said that it was in charge of the data centre project, the City of Kouvola sold land to another Finnish company named Hyperco Fin Holdco 1. According to Kauppalehti, that company is actually the firm in charge of the project. Yle found that Sajwani owns 26.6 percent of that company, while another shareholder is a Chinese citizen in his late 50s. Information about other shareholders in the firm is less clear, because the chain of ownership is linked to foreign companies. Yle has been unable to reach a Hyperco representative for comment as of Wednesday afternoon. Mayor: City aware of owner Kouvola's Mayor Marita Toikka told Yle she knew that Hypercon was owned by Sajwani. According to her, this did not have an influential impact on deciding to go ahead with the data centre deal. "By and large, the City is the planning and permitting authority, and seller of the property. So we evaluate the company's operations solely from these perspectives. How the ownership base changes or expands is a matter for the company itself," Toikka said. The planned data centre will primarily serve TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media platform that many critics say poses security risks. For example, Donald Trump has threatened to ban the platform if it remains under Chinese ownership. But according to Mayor Toikka, the City's role is not to assess international data security issues, saying that job is for Finland and Europe to handle. "We do not speculate on such questions in vain, because we cannot influence them. Experts' perspectives about [TikTok's] data security are quite contradictory. It is difficult to draw an unambiguous conclusion from them. It is one platform among others," Toikka said. At the end of last year, the City signed a deal to sell a 12.5-hectare parcel of land to Hyperco for use as a data centre. This year it made a preliminary agreement with the company about a similar-sized piece of land. According to City documents, the preliminary agreement on the second parcel of land will enable Hyperco to expand in the future. The total value of both transactions amounts to less than two million euros. The mayor said that the initiative for the deals came from Hyperco. Sajwani's background Hussain Sajwani has in the past said complimentary things about Russian investors. Dubai is known to have become a key hub for Russian funds in recent years. In 2023, Sajwani said that Dubai would be glad to accept Russian money, as long as it was "clean". In a post on his website, Sajwani praised Russian investments in a "sanction-free Dubai"Opens an external website. "'I’m sure a lot of Russians are trying to fix their problems and their issues, but Dubai will benefit ultimately from any crisis,' [Sajwani] said. It comes after the UAE, which has deepening ties with Russia, decided not to match sanctions imposed by Western nations on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine," the post read. "'I’ll be honest with you, these sanctions… they made a lot of people nervous,' Sajwani said. 'If anyone brings money through the banking system here legally and professionally, we’ll do business with them,'” it continued. From Russia to the Caribbean Sajwani's investment company has operated in Russia as well. For example, it participated in building venues for the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. The project was led by Russian President Vladimir Putin — who at the time was the country's Prime Minister. The two men were seen at a press conference about an investment deal in 2010Opens an external website. Sajwani was also named in an investigative report by the OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which said that Sajwani was placed on a Canadian sanctions listOpens an external website between 2011 and 2014, over allegations of corruption. In 2021, an Egyptian court sentenced Sajwani in absentia to five years in prison over real estate deal irregularities. However, Sajwani called the court's verdict a "sham"Opens an external website and politically motivated. Meanwhile, the OCCRP said that Sajwani applied to purchase citizenship on the Caribbean dual island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis in 2010, as it sells citizenship to people who invest there. The OCCRP said that his initial application was declined but that there was email evidence suggesting that he appealed the decision and it remained unclear whether he was granted citizenship.