OBITUARY writers the world over have been toiling on their eulogies to Nelson Mandela, the ailing South African statesman. They will now have to delve into a wholly different register to mark the passing of Marc Rich, the commodities trader-cum-law evader, who died on Wednesday morning, aged 78.
Mr Rich is best known, at least in business circles, for revolutionising oil trading in the early 1970s. He is credited with creating the spot market which allowed for immediate, one-off purchase of cargoes, rather than the years-long contracts then imposed by oil majors. He knew how to exploit his invention, too. One trick was to opportunistically pick up shipments from participants?notably the Iranians, then holding hostages and facing international sanctions?which few others wanted to deal with.?
Yet it is more likely that he will be remembered for embargo-busting exploits, along with the tax-dodging that accompanied them. He fled America in 1983 for Switzerland, hours before facing arrest for reaping illicit profits on the Iranian oil deals. A young Rudolph Giuliani, at the time the new US attorney for the Southern District of New York, was among those chasing him. They later called the case ?the biggest tax evasion case in United States history.? Mr Rich hopped from St Moritz to Jamaica to Marbella and back to Switzerland, forever staying ahead of the feds (a bit like whistleblower Edward Snowden today).
The pressure should have eased in 2001 when Bill Clinton pardoned him on his last day of office. The circumstances of the pardon?Denise Rich, the trader?s ex-wife, was a generous donor to causes favoured by the Clintons, including Hilary?s then-nascent political career?helped to tarnish the outgoing president?s image, at least for a time. It did not give Mr Rich the legal comfort to return to America, where he had migrated from Belgium as an 8-year-old.
He called himself a ?business machine? and his interests went beyond the black stuff. He traded just about anything that came out of the ground. Glencore, the commodities behemoth that recently merged with Xstrata, is a descendant of his shop, as is Trafigura, another global commodity trading company. In the early 1980s, he bought a stake in 20th?Century Fox, sold on to Rupert Murdoch after he absconded. In 2012 his worth was $2.5 billion by one estimate. He used the money to indulge his taste for Picassos, Mir?s and others.
Thanks to an extensive public relations campaign, he achieved a level of social respectability in Swiss society not usually afforded to those facing 325 years in an American prison if the feds had had their way. Extensive philanthropy focused on Europe and Israel (where he is to be buried on Thursday) helped.
For a time, it looked like Mr Rich had lived out the American dream sought out by his working-class parents fleeing the Nazis in 1941. Despite his travails, he pined after America.?In the 1980s he told an interviewer that he thought about it every day. ?It's a generous country that accepted my parents and me.? He had made mistakes, he admitted, but he was misunderstood, too. ''What happened to me was an unfortunate chain of events that hasn't shaken my faith in the US.?
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/06/marc-rich
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