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.”

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Bloomberg –  Arpad Busson is angry. He’s just looked at the latest returns of a hedge fund he used to invest in; it’s down more than 60 percent in the past nine months.

“That a-hole!” Busson says of the New York-based manager, as he walks out of the conference room at the Mayfair offices of EIM SA, the $11.5 billion fund-of-hedge-funds firm of which he is founder and chairman. Though EIM yanked its money out of the fund in April 2008, when it was down only 25 percent, Busson says there are too many like it out there.

“If these managers are not focused on preservation of capital, they should not have the right to manage other people’s money,” he says.

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