Bloomberg – At 17, Eugenie Iseman says she’s too young to attend college, but is old enough to enlist Uma Thurman to help the poor in Liberia. It doesn’t hurt that she has the backing of her father and hedge-fund manager Frederick J. Iseman.

The younger Iseman hosted her first fundraiser last night at Butter, a Manhattan restaurant, raising $375,000 for the Liberian village of Karnplay, which she visited last year with two friends and her mother, Marguerite Nougue-San. Thurman, an Iseman family friend, and her fiance, Arpad Busson, chairman of the London-based hedge fund EIM UK Ltd., paid $25,000 for an auction item to equip an operating room at the African village.

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Moneybiz – Liberia has bought back $1.2-billion in government debt at a steep discount, the World Bank, which helped finance the buyback, said on Thursday.

The impoverished African country has "significantly reduced its foreign debt" at a discount of nearly 97 percent of face value, "the steepest ever negotiated on developing country commercial debt," the World Bank said.

The multilateral development lender said the deal, capping two years of negotiation, was concluded with the payment of $38-million to retire 25 outstanding commercial claims.

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Tags: buyback, commercial claims, commercial debt, developing country, face value, foreign debt, government-debt, liberia, multilateral development, negotiation, steep discount, world bank