New York Times Blogs – Bill Clinton has plenty of friends in high finance.

Lifting a longstanding cloak of secrecy, the former president last week released a complete list of about 208,000 donors to his foundation as part of an agreement to check against possible conflicts, as his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is in line to become the next secretary of state.

While the list has been heavily scrutinized from a geopolitical perspective, it is also interesting to note how many heavy hitters from the financial world were contributors.

Hedge funds were big donors to Mr. Clinton’s organization over the years. The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the charitable arm of the United Kingdom-based activist hedge fund, gave more than $25 million to the Clinton foundation, making it one of the top two donors on the list, along with Unitaid, an international organization that fights H.I.V and AIDS.

Other contributors from the hedge fund world included EIM Group’s Arpad Busson; Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management; and Sterling Stamos Capital Management, the hedge fund founded by New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, who was recently stung by Bernard Madoff’s fraud. Each gave between $1 million to $5 million, records show.

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Financial Times – Dubai yesterday joined the chorus of regulatory voices condemning the short-selling of shares as concern mounted that hedge funds shorting key Gulf companies are contributing to a dramatic drop in regional bourses.

Short selling, through which investors benefit from share price falls, is not allowed in the Gulf, but hedge funds have been shorting heavyweight regional stocks with the help of international brokerages and offshore accounts, according to local money managers. In the past three months, the MSCI Gulf index has dropped more than a fifth, which would equate to a loss of nearly $300bn (€208bn, £164bn) in total market capitalisation.

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