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.
Herald Tribune – At a bail hearing in which Arthur G. Nadel was sent back to his cell to come up with better co-signers, a federal judge heard from the receiver in the case about a previously unknown multimillion-dollar hedge fund account controlled by Nadel in the Cayman Islands.
Receiver Burton Wiand, a Tampa lawyer, testified that he had discovered a hedge fund in the Caymans that at one point contained $15 million. He was able to follow $5 million back to one of the six funds at Nadel’s Scoop Management in Sarasota. The whereabouts of the remaining $10 million is unclear.
The press has been agog recently about Paradigm Capital, a fund-of-hedge-funds run by members of Joe Biden’s family, and its apparent connection with a hedge fund shut by the SEC called Ponta Negra. CJR’s Audit column has the full details on this remarkable scoop by a finance blogger named John Hempton.
Among other things, Hempton was threatened by lawyers for Ponta Negra, forcing him to withdraw a post, as he detailed in a post yesterday.
Herald Tribune – Partners of failed hedge fund trader Arthur Nadel said they were shocked to learn after Nadel disappeared on Jan. 14 that the six hedge funds for which he did the trading had been emptied of their purported $300 million in assets.
But what seems mysterious to them raised red flags in 2005 for the founders of HedgeCo.Net, a West Palm Beach hedge fund database site. HedgeCo dropped three funds run by Nadel’s Scoop Management Inc. — Valhalla Investment Partners LP, Viking Fund LLC and Viking IRA LLC. The concerns were: reported returns that were considerably higher than normal, no outside firm to verify the numbers and no outside administrator to monitor the accounts and send out statements to investors.
Herald Tribune – A federal judge extended a freeze on the assets of Sarasota’s Arthur G. Nadel on Tuesday, but failed to include other partners — a measure some investors with the accused hedge fund swindler have been pushing for aggressively because Nadel shared $95.5 million in incentive fees with other Scoop Management Inc. principals.
Nadel did not contest U.S. District Judge Richard A. Lazzara’s order freezing personal and business bank accounts, property and other assets Nadel controls solely or with others, so a hearing scheduled for today was canceled.
Investors like Fort Lauderdale’s Louis Paolino Jr., who is out $5.8 million since the Jan. 14 implosion of the six funds Nadel managed, had hoped the hearing might shed light on why the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was not seeking to include Nadel partners Neil or Chris Moody in the freeze.
ABC Action News – “I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t sleep well at night; I am up and down every couple of hours.
Leslie Collier was on the verge of retirement until she discovered a week ago that her $600,000 investment with Scoop Management and the man who handled her money, Art Nadel, are missing.
Since then Collier and her husband Larry say it’s just been one thing after another,
“As time goes on I get madder and madder about it because I was totally ripped off
The Independent – Since the credit crunch began, hedge fund managers have become one of the most maligned sections of society, held responsible for the economic pain which all of us now feel. Never mind a row of shrubs, they should probably start managing a line of sandbags and an air-raid shelter.
So it is not surprising that Christian Smith, editor of a journal dedicated to this indescribably wealthy and secretive group, informs its readers that Hedge magazine is intended to be their "safe haven". In a letter from the editor, he writes: "If there’s one thing everybody needs right now, it’s good news and plenty of it, and we’re here to serve it up in spades."
Alongside articles about art collecting, fine wines and cricket, are full-page advertisements for Pershing yachts, luxury watches and Australian pink diamonds. The cover star is the usually reclusive, Mike Platt, the CEO of Europe’s thirdlargest hedge fund management company, BlueCrest, who the magazine has persuaded to give an interview about his interest in cutting-edge art. That’s quite a scoop.
