Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that Brexit was the "stupidest thing any country has ever done" apart from the election of Donald Trump as US president.
The media mogul reportedly told a technology conference in Boston two weeks ago "maybe I wouldn't have" opened a new European headquarters in London if he had known the UK was going to quit the EU.
This is according to reports in the Guardian.
"My former wife was a Brit, my daughters have British passports, so we love England - it's the father of our country, I suppose," Mr Bloomberg said according to the newspaper.
"But what they are doing is not good and there is no easy way to get out of it because if they don't pay a penalty, everyone else would drop out. So they can't get as good of a deal as they had before."
"I did say that I thought it was the single stupidest thing any country has ever done but then we Trumped it," Mr Bloomberg said.
Mr Bloomberg was in London this week to open a new European headquarters for Bloomberg in the City, covering 1.3 hectares.
Bloomberg employs 4,000 staff in the UK and 20,000 worldwide, and the New York-based firm has long made the UK its headquarters in Europe.
But Michael Bloomberg said some staff were becoming unhappy about London as a key location.
He said London was the centre of Europe but warned that was "not going to be as true any more" due to Brexit.
