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Guardian.co.uk – The secretive hedge fund manager and philanthropist Chris Hohn last year donated almost half a billion pounds to the children’s charity run by his wife, it emerged yesterday.
The £486m gift follows hefty profits at Hohn’s hedge fund TCI in 2007, and beat the previous year’s donation of £276m. The financier has now donated more than £1bn in total, more than the gross domestic product of countries including Greenland and Antigua.
The funds will be given to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the charity that Hohn co-founded with his wife Jamie to help children in poor and developing countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Central America.
Reuters – Activist hedge fund firm TCI, which launched an attack on ABN AMRO in 2007 that helped trigger the Dutch bank’s sale, has seen profits surge 73 percent but warned this year will be tougher.
The Children’s Investment Fund Management (UK) LLP reported profit available for sharing among members of 555.9 million pounds for the year to end-August 2008, up from 321.0 million pounds a year before.
The firm paid 484.3 million pounds to its charity CIFF (The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation), up from 271.4 million pounds a year before.
Telegraph.co.uk – Mayor Boris Johnson will welcome guests, thought to include Tony Blair, Elton John and Jemima Khan, who have paid up to £100,000-a-table to be at the event at the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo.
Despite being dubbed Britain’s most extravagant party, the organisers said it will be more low key.
Arpad "Arki" Busson, the French financier and chairman of the dinner’s charity Absolute Return for Kids, said: "We have cut the costs of staging the event by two-thirds and there are two-thirds less luxury lots too. We have to be reflective and respecting of the times."
Whereas in past years, Prince, Elton John and Stevie Wonder have performed, this year the entertainment will be provided by the London Chamber Orchestra.
New York Daily News - Jacob Ezra Merkin was once revered as a wizard of Wall Street, an angel of charity and a lion of Judaic studies.
Now he has earned infamy as a destroyer of wealth, a menace to philanthropy, a pariah in some synagogues and a target of a probe by the state attorney general’s office.
A single unforgivable deed capsized his fortune, reputation and social standing overnight: He embraced a false prophet of profit named Bernard Madoff.
Bloomberg – Martin Ward, a teacher at a London experimental school called the Evelyn Grace Academy, is pitching Arpad Busson on a new idea for getting poor kids interested in science. The charity that Busson leads, Absolute Return for Kids, or ARK, is a sponsor of Evelyn Grace to the tune of 2 million pounds.
Ward wants to buy a used ice-cream truck and turn it into a mobile science lab so that kids at cash-strapped schools around London can do hands-on experiments. Busson, who runs fund-of- hedge-funds firm EIM SA, asks a few questions and confers with a colleague. “It’s done,” he says. “You’ve got it. We’ve found the money.”
