The Hedge Fund and the Despot | Hacker News Reader

The Hedge Fund and the Despot

businessweek.com

38 pointstehrania7 comments

This is disgusting, in so many ways. Investing in Africa often has its own set of moral qualms, but doing business with Mugabe lacks even the pretense that you're doing any good to offset dealing with a bastard. Sadly, I think mercurial is right - nothing will end up happening, because that's the lay of the land.

> In July, Och-Ziff hired David Becker, the SEC’s former general counsel, as its chief legal officer.

Right. I'm betting for a quiet settlement, a few millions changing hands and everybody retiring to their hard-won country estate and living happily ever after.

They may need more than one settlement, as they are already being investigated for bribery in Gaddaffi's Libya, and they might be prosecuted by both the US and the UK.

I hope they go to jail for this. I also hope they have trouble sleeping at night, but I doubt it. They have blood on their hands purely for greed.

I remember this deal from when I was a hedge fund manager at a similar company, seemed very off indeed so refused to be a part.

Some very odd African mineral companies on AIM, very few I felt comfortable investing in (did turn down joining OZ a bit after too for a lower paying role elsewhere, Michael was an interesting chap).

Doubt anyone will go to jail, seen much worse than this somehow slide (from institutional asset managers as well as hedge funds)

Mugabe had led one of two guerrilla groups that liberated the former Rhodesia from a white-minority regime

Liberated in the same sense that Stalin liberated Eastern Europe.

The hedge fund (Och-Ziff) sounds like it was ripped from pages of a movie script. Young protege, cross-Atlantic deals with African dictators, corrupt soviet oligarchs, lavish estate in British countryside... no happy end though.

Sounds like something out of Richard K Morgan's "Market Forces" actually.

But that's assuming life imitates art. Clearly it's the opposite - as books like John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" seem to indicate.

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