Am I being scammed?

I just have to share this story either to warn people or to get advice.

Basically I had the idea to start a own gym and sell gym equipment. It's a bit more than an idea actually. I already established connections in China and developed a series of Strength machines and strongman equipment.

Already know which locations I am going to rent and have everything pretty much planned out even the marketing. All the websites are up and running too (expect the one for the gym).

Obviously I need a lot of money for this so I created a executive summary and went ahead and searched for investors.

Through LinkedIn somebody got me in contact with somebody who supposedly was the director of areslifesciences.com.

After some e-mailing back and forth I send him the executive summary and he got me in contact with Ernesto Bertarelli on Skype. Mind you that all these e-mail addresses and Skype id's seemed to appear real and were not linked with some yahoo or gmail accounts. They all seemed to be associated with areslifesciences.com.

After the meeting on Skype with Ernesto Bertarelli (or was he?) I was told that they would transfer a huge amount of money to my bank account as an investment for my business. Mr Ernesto (or at least the guy I talked to on Skype)
referred me to chasejohnson.co.uk/ and said that this was his private bank.

The instruction was to send them my passport ID and bank details for the transfer. The private bank e-mailed me back with confirmation and said I had to pay a fee for this transaction. I told them to withdraw the fee from the amount of money that was being transferred to my bank account (like any normal bank does). They refused and said I had to wire the money to them.

I became suspicious and shared my concern with the assistant of Mr Ernesto. He basically told me I wasted their time and if I didn't wire the money for the transaction fee within 24 hours that the deal was off.

I told them I couldn't afford the transaction fee anyway (trust me it's a very large amount of money) and I never heard from them again.

The question is.. Were these people pretending to be Mr Ernesto and his team or was I dealing with the real Mr Ernesto and his team of people.

Either way there was no contract and no terms or conditions which on itself is already very strange.

I have 12 hours left to wire the money to the private bank before the transaction is officially canceled. I really need some advice from people on this situation that I'm. Please note that either way I can't afford the transaction fee and I am not going to take this risk.

I will not leave this message up too long because I don't want to damage Mr Ernesto his reputation. However, I would really like to get some answers.

** UPDATE **

It is confirmed that I was indeed approached by a scammer. Thankfully he did not get my money.
Hopefully, this story alerts other people.