Marc Rich

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Marc Rich (born Marc David Reich on December 18, 1934) is an international commodities trader. He fled the United States in 1983 to live in Switzerland while being prosecuted on charges of tax evasion and illegally making oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis.

He received a presidential pardon from United States President Bill Clinton in 2001, which required him to pay a $100 million fine before the charges would be dropped.

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[edit] Life

Rich was born to a Jewish working class family in Antwerp, Belgium in 1934. The Rich family immigrated to the United States in 1942 to avoid the Nazis. Young Marc attended high school at the Rhodes School in Manhattan. He later attended New York University, but dropped out after one semester to go work for Philipp Brothers. Rich worked as commodities trader for his father, who sought to build an American manufacturing fortune through burlap sack production. Marc Rich later worked with Philipp Brothers, a dealer in raw metals, learning about the international raw materials markets and commercial trading with poor, third world nations. His tutelage under Brothers afforded Rich opportunities to strike deals with various dictatorial regimes and embargoed nations, such as Iran, using a special relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini. His company Marc Rich Real Estate GmbH is involved in large developer projects (e.g. in Prague, Czech Republic [1]).

[edit] Crime

In 1983, Rich and partner Pincus Green were indicted by U.S. Attorney and future mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani, on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Both of them fled to Switzerland before a court appearance, and they remained on the FBI's Most Wanted List for many years.

On January 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, President Bill Clinton granted Rich a presidential pardon. Since Rich's former wife and mother of his three children, socialite Denise Rich, had made large donations to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library during Clinton's time in office, Clinton's critics alleged that Rich's pardon had been bought. Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cited the clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Federal Prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to investigate. She stepped down before the investigation was finished and was replaced by James Comey. Though Comey was critical of Clinton's pardons, he could not find any grounds on which to indict him.

During hearings after Rich's pardon, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000, denied that Rich had violated the tax laws, but criticized him for trading with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages.

Marc Rich, after spending several years in the canton of Zug, moved his domicile to Meggen, a city part of the Swiss canton of Lucerne, where he zealously guards his privacy, but managed to be hunted down by a 60 Minutes TV crew once and he agreed to a one-time only interview. He resides in a property called "La villa rose" (the pink villa) on the shores of the Vierwaldstättersee (also known as Lake Lucerne). Rich also owns property in the ski resort of St. Moritz, Switzerland and in Marbella, Spain.

His business partner, Pincus Green, is known to be the "logistics" brain of their company.[citation needed]

[edit] Legacy

Whilst Marc Rich certainly didn't invent commodity trading he was its major architect[citation needed] and engineer[citation needed]. Centred in London, the global oil trade can be said to improve the efficient use of fixed assets such as terminals, ships, refineries and production which oil majors and governments are not incentivised to put to best use. His obvious corporate legacy is Glencore, a company he founded, domiciled in Baar (close to Zug, Switzerland) but centred in London, where the arts of trading were discerned and practiced[citation needed]. Glencore also spawned and nourished (unwittingly) many imitations[citation needed]. The Oil Markets are now awash with trading companies such as Trafigura and Projector, attempting to profit both through the direction of risk capital towards vanilla trading of commodities on exchanges and in OTC markets but also in the more opaque deals for which Marc Rich was infamous.[citation needed]

[edit] Citizenship

While most sources agree that Marc Rich voluntarily relinquished his U.S. citizenship, there is one contrary opinion [2] that "Rich assumed an oath in Spain would remove his US citizenship. The Spanish naturalization oath he took included an explicit renunciation of US citizenship. Due to a variety of circumstances the court judged that he was still a US citizen."

Since he is still considered a US citizen, Forbes ranks Rich as the 242nd richest American with a 2006 net worth of $1.5 billion [3].

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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