But the idea that Susan's mother's mortgage was £10 is so preposterous that it really can't be taken seriously. We may not have been told the amount, but we can guess that it falls within reasonably credible parameters.

You seem to have failed to grasp two words from the post you quoted, which I've put into bold. That poster wasn't saying that Susan hadn't been shown to be talking rubbish on other subjects, just that on that one, ie her mother's mortgage, she hadn't.

Susan has used the mortgage to ask us to accept that she is good in business. It is such a vague statement that it means nothing, it could be for £10 or £100,000 pounds. Without knowing the figure it is meaningless but it does make her sound impressive in the short term.
It also implies that her mother was not paying the mortgage or not contributing in someway. Otherwise it would have been more correct to say I helped my mother pay off her mortgage. Susan's mother also ran a successful market stall so I'm sure it is not the case but her statement is misleading.

I went to a party at a friend's house which she held to celebrate paying off her mortgage. The figure was £30 (all that remained after 25 years). If I had given my friend £30 could I have also said that I was paying her mortgage off?

My adult children live in my house and pay me rent. They could also claim to be "paying my mortgage".
A claim as impressive as Susan's sounds should be substantiated or not used IMO

Thats a very odd thing to assume. Occasionally newspapers used to run competitions to 'pay off your mortgage' - what happens there is that the outstanding amount is paid off as the prize, eg if you had a 25 year loan of £100,000 which now has 15 years to run and £70,000 owed then the £75,000 is paid. That was my assumption of what Susan ment - that she paid off the outstanding loan.
You are quite right in that she may have only paid off £30 or that she even simply ment she paid bed and board. But given how Claude has delved into such claims in the past (Yasmina's accounts, contacting Simon's tenents) it would be pretty daft to do so.

if anyone can prove in this thread that Susan's mums mortgage arrears were £10 please reply to this post.....

if not

case closed

Can someone fill in the gaps on Susan's history? She went with mum to Australia at the age of 6(?) not speaking a word of English. She came to Britain at the age of 12(?) with her mum not speaking a word of English?

In that condition her mum would not have bought a house on the day of arrival. So her mum's house was bought 9 years ago at the earliest, probably much later, what with all the hassle of finding a school for Susan and her mum earning a living not speaking a word of English.

Hands up anybody who paid off a mortgage in southern England in under 9 years. Working every spare hour and at weekends during school and uni, Susan at one time became an employer of 15. She paid off her mum's mortgage instead of buying a fast car, experimenting with cocaine, or going on holidays with boyfriends. Whatever else I think about Susan I am moved by this deed, not talk. Lets give credit where credit is due.

In episode 2 Susan is introduced as "a market trader" and in her pitch to become PM she says:

On her website she says she used the money from her market stall to
If we take this as an average yearly amount of £23,000 profit over the 3 years. Her university expenses could be kept to £10,000 a year (fees and very sparse London living)
This leaves an average of £13,000 spare to pay the mortgage and deposit for a London property. I don't live in London so I'm guessing that she must have paid approx£200,000 for a small property (flat/studio) as she has bought it so recently. Just confused about how much deposit she would need.
Anyway, whatever the deposit is, the remaider by elimination, is what she used to pay off her mothers mortgage.

Susan would be wise not to be too explicit about £70K profit including when as a sole trader, in case Revenue and Customs wake up .

At uni Helen did not make £70K trading profit, and at age 21 she was a waitress not an investor in property. With Susan's fantastic mortgage repayment record by age 21 she would likely be treated leniently by lenders re deposit terms. The 3 interviewers including fearsome Claude had uncovered evidence of youthful optimism but not of misrepresentation. Hard-as-nails Lord Sugar softened towards Susan at YF, the lord who previously blasted all bullshitters to smithereens.

The bottom line is that at age 21 she has been granted mortgage by other hard-as-nails to buy a second home as investment property when other 21yo's are in Recession sackcloth and ashes. Susan has shown no signs of talking like Melody or Stuart Baggs the Brand. With indirect evidence already available, and with R&C probably watching in the wings, it would be unreasonable to demand personal answers from Susan in public, so long as she is not proposing to head an investment fund open to the public.

- There is no evidence that Susan hasn't paid all her taxes.

- We do not know how much Susan's Mums "fantastic mortagage repayment payment" was.

- We do not know if Susan has bought her "investment Property" on her own, if her fantastic business was a factor or how much is costs. It could be a garage with two parking spaces for all we know.

I guess her Mum wasn't doing too badly from her own business seeing as she was able to get a mortgage in the first place and its quite possible she helped Susan with the initial financing of her business. I would've thought she got most inspiration from her mother as opposed to other market traders.

It's so fair.

I haven't seen any mention of her father, so presumably he was left behind in China...or?

For what it's worth I never rated Susan. Too full of youthful, deluded naivity and came across as pretty childish much of the time so not my cup of tea. To buy from someone I need to like them, trust in what they're saying and believe in what they're saying and selling. Susan fell down on all three counts for me.

She did come across as driven and ruthlessly ambitious however. I'm sure she will go on to have some success in the future, but has a bit of growing up to do in the meantime I'd say.

The last instalment of £30 was not the mortgage. Had Susan paid off only a single instalment, I'd have expected that to be raised, and it plainly wasn't. Nor would I accept that by giving someone money you actually owe them that you are paying their mortgage.

Taking your first two paragraphs none of it stacked up for me either, and how did her Mum even get a market stall if she couldn't speak English. Who was she selling to? How did she buy the house? How did she cope for 6? years in Oz not speaking English?

If what she claimed as set out in your third para is correct, well done indeed. But I am not convinced that this is still more smoke and mirrors .......

So, to get back to the OP, it looks like no one here, even the Suziefans, has bought any of her products, despite her huge turnover?

There are two posters who said they bought products without realising they were from Susan. One said those products were nice.

I must be having a 'middle-aged' day because I can't find those posts? Numbers?

Some ethnic groups e.g. Asians, East Europeans and South Americans have been known to live in ethnic conclaves where they can get along in daily life quite adequately on minimal English. Brit expats in Russia have also been known to cluster together refusing to learn Russian? Older persons may have less appetite for the substantial effort of learning a new language. Market traders probably do not need to go beyond the grammar level in "Are the French very fond of their children?" Arguably Lord Sugar would also fail a grammar exam -- "It don't bloody bother me".

At YF Susan showed admiration for her mum's strength of character and resourcefulness. Such a person could have made good money in Hong Kong or Singapore using just her mother tongue. Mother and daughter emigrated first to Oz then to UK, rather than to Germany or France, so Susan's estranged(?) dad may have some connection with the UK and leant a hand at crucial stages.

Susan's claims without full evidence triggered scepticism probably because they were used to emphasise Susan's Apprentice candidacy. Hard nuts Alan and interviewers would have gone into details with a fine comb, after which the £700 millionaire wanted to do a deal with Susan. He did not get where he is by letting the whole world see he can be hoodwinked by a 21yo with big talk.

Argent thinks that Tamales' post is about the most sensible thing ever published on DS on the subject of 100% natural products, and endorses everything that Tamales has said.

I'm not saying anything against Susan, I'm sure she's worked incredibly hard to get where she is, but I also was a bit puzzled about the non-English speaking mother. I've always thought that Australia was actually less tolerant than the UK regarding people not speaking English - wouldn't the mother have had to learn at least basic English, even if she was living in an ethnic Chinese neighbourhood?

In different threads. I searched for those posts with various key words and there are too many posts with same key words. The first one was about a month ago and the second poster was last week or the week before. I'm quite certain the second poster's comment was made within two days of the last episode.


Unless you intend to become a citizen, you don't necessarily need to know English. It's just as much as you don't need to know French when living in France or Japanese in Japan.

Finally found the second post. Yay.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showp...4&postcount=14

I haven't bought anything of Susan's yet but am going to buy the body polish.

Well done Susan!

There's a disconnect between what one of the interviewers said and whatever was behind LS's decision to say on YF that he was interested in doing a deal with her.

There's also a disconnect between how he treated Stuart Baggs last year; and Susan Ma this year. He ripped Stuart to pieces on the back of what one of his interviewers, the 'tech expert' who didn't know what ISP stood for, had told him when it seems that the extent of their fine-tooth combing on that occasion was the widely know fact that Manx Telecom has held a telecommunication stronghold on the Isle of Man for eons & it was only recently that Sure were able to enter their hallowed territory. It didn't look like they went terribly far beyond that very obvious factoid.

But no mind, you've reminded me of something else. Tom won & LS announces that there's a way of marrying the two things up. Hello? Isn't this Tom's business? Does Tom even want that whiny little brat in his business or is she being shoe-horned into it regardless?

Helen would be an asset to him. Susan? Not so much.

Last year LS was incandescent with rage that for the sake of keeping Stuart Baggs he fired Liz Locke. In front of 10 million viewers on YF he tore into The Brand. Consensus was near unanimous that Liz was wrongly fired. After 6 years, 6 candidates have resigned from Sugar Towers, Stella English was persuaded to stay on with a job switch, but for how long? Apparently after one year she hardly saw Sugar at all let alone receive business mentoring from him. With gagging clauses plus the might of Sugar Empire, ex-Apprentices are unlikely to spill the beans.

The next 12 months will be very different, as success or failure of the new joint venture cannot be hidden from national media responding to public curiosity. In the full glare of publicity whether Tom+Sugar will work, whether Susan+Sugar will work will be followed nationwide like a soap opera. The outcome will be revealed soon enough. It will be Sugar's credibility on the line. Is he still economic adviser to the Labour party?

Helen tweeted she has accepted LS advice that she is better suited to corporate life than running MyPy or some such startup, much as she enjoyed MyPy.

Lets all remember our various forecasts, and meet in 12 months to see who can say "I told you so."