Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
Reuters – Hedge fund manager Jeffrey Gendell is mounting a comeback after a turbulent 2008.
Gendell’s Tontine Associates LLC, disclosed plans in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing to raise funds for a new total return hedge fund. So far, $12.6 million has been raised for on-shore and offshore versions of the fund, but that is only a fraction of the amount Tontine expects to gather, people familiar with the firm’s plans said on Monday.
Tampa Bay Online – Some consider them good capitalists. Others see them as opportunists. Still others call them vultures.
Whatever the name, hedge fund investors likely will be major players in Florida real estate in the next few years, buying up mortgage notes — troubled or not — for a fraction of their original value.
Often, the funds are passive investors. But here in Sun City Center, Jim Biggins is fighting to protect his family business, Cypress Creek Assisted Living Residence, from a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund called Silver Point Capital.
USA Today – A Spanish banking giant that channeled $3 billion of its clients’ funds to Bernard Madoff has agreed to repay more than $235 million it withdrew from the confessed Ponzi scheme architect in the months before the scam collapsed in December.
Pending federal bankruptcy court approval, the deal announced Tuesday by a hedge fund investment subsidiary of Banco Santander would boost the amount recovered to help repay Madoff’s victims past the $1.2 billion mark.
The settlement would return 85% of the total sought from Spain’s largest bank by Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee seeking Madoff’s assets for redistribution to thousands of victimized investors worldwide. Picard has so far issued more than $100 million in repayment commitments, a fraction of the total losses.
Newsinferno.com – Bernard Madoff trustee, Irving Picard, has sued three Fairfield Greenwich Group hedge funds—Fairfield Sentry Ltd., Greenwich Sentry LP, and Greenwich Sentry Partners LP—in a clawback suit that seeks the return of $3.54 billion to repay victims of Madoff’s historic Ponzi scheme, said Bloomberg News.
Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 fraud counts on March 12. The former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange ran an investment advisory business (Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, or BLMIS), for decades that was, in reality, a Ponzi scheme. Last November, Madoff told his investors that his fund held more than $64 billion, but in reality, it only held a mere fraction of that amount.
Reuters UK – Five months after Bernard Madoff’s massive fraud was revealed, little of his victims’ money has been found and it appears increasingly likely that the worldwide hunt for their missing billions will drag on for years.
So far, the court-appointed trustee sorting through Wall Street’s biggest investment fraud has located only about $1 billion (656 million pounds) to be distributed to defrauded customers — a fraction of the $65 billion the confessed con man’s records purported to have in nearly 7,000 client accounts when the FBI arrested him in December.
Trustee Irving Picard has signalled, however, that he is ramping up efforts to find more money, a ray of hope for victims if these funds can ever be tracked down and shared among them.
At this relatively early stage of Picard’s investigation, though, it is unclear if that is possible.
