The Man Who May Become the Richest Rothschild ? - they are much richer than many official numbers say

The information below is not up to date as Atticus has lost a fortune in 2008 but that is not why I show this excerpt. I think that Rothschild's have webbed their fortune under many names and enterprises and do not let their off springs wreck it by any means but if they prove that they are worth while they might get a bigger saying on what it is to do. Goldman is an outlet of the Rothschilds but just one part of many within a sinister conglomerate of enterprises of all sorts but as I happen to know from my professional life is the finance world as I was negotiating with the Treasurer of the Jewish Community of Germany back in the very early 90's about some investments. The friendly man ( who's name I will not publish ) told me that all these ideas sound really nice but they were committed to some much more interesting investments. I just want to remind that the walls dividing Germany them had just come down and Gorbatschov had torred down old communism. The earlier mentioned Jewish community of Germany had back then a war chest of a few billion Mark and went into Eastern Europe to buy real estate for pennies which are worth at the highs 100 times what they invested and they did that along with Mr Soros. Imagine what the real smart guys have done then from the Rothschild's - that money must be worth trillions now. Some other weird stuff happened in that period as the possessions of Eastern Germany were sold for pennies although they were worth far more and that Germany offered a fixed exchange rate at some point for Eastern German money ( which was basically worthless). A scandal of big proportions which was swiped beneath the carpet was that the Stasi ( Eastern German Secret Service) got double digit billions back then of real Deutsch Marks by delivering worthlesss Eastern currency, which disappeared and no traces ever were found same as the 10 bil. Dollar the Worldbank transferred at that time to Yeltsin and disappeared ( Safra was involved in that and the Vatikan Bank). Really weird things happened back then and no one cared about it which is really amazing. Helmut Kohl the German chancellor was involved in many weird deals and as usual was paid off as a 'consultant' by UBS the swiss bank as a consultant after he left office. Back in the 90's the biggest theft happened in Europe and tremendous fortunes were made by insiders.

Excerpt

By Landon Thomas Jr. – New York Times March 9, 2007

Happy or unhappy, each family generation often resembles another, and that is especially true when it comes to the Rothschilds.

More than 200 years after Mayer Amschel Rothschild founded the family dynasty that offered discreet counsel and investment wisdom to kings, queens, emperors and industrial titans, his 35-year-old direct descendant, Nathaniel, has emerged as a kingmaker in his own right and an investor who some say may become the richest Rothschild of them all.

In five short years, the man in line to be the fifth Baron Rothschild is close to becoming a billionaire through a web of private equity investments in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and most significant, his partnership stake in Atticus Capital, the fast-growing $14 billion hedge fund.

The ascent of Mr. Rothschild is a vivid illustration of how the still glittering, if somewhat faded, prestige and wealth of Europe’s most storied banking family has been reinvigorated from bold bets in this era’s new-money investment vehicles.

Like his forebears, he prefers that his influence remain unseen.

Mr. Rothschild is a principal adviser to Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest oligarchs in Russia and the owner of the aluminum giant Rusal, which recently merged with two other companies to create the world’s largest aluminum company. Mr. Rothschild received no public credit despite having played a crucial role in getting the deal done.

And like a true Rothschild he has a taste for the good life: as an avid skier, his principal residence is in Klosters, Switzerland, and he uses his Gulfstream jet to shuttle among his other homes in Paris, Moscow, London, New York and Greece.

But he is also a man of contradictions: he dates supermodels and actresses, sits on an advisory board of the Brookings Institution, a research organization in Washington, and serves his guests the best wines from the Rothschild vineyards, which he himself will not drink.

He professes to have a penchant for privacy and would not be interviewed for this article, yet he allowed his lushly renovated town house in Greenwich Village to be featured in Men’s Vogue magazine. Despite his reputation as the most gregarious of men and the increasingly public nature of his life and career, he comes across as a pinched, reticent man in the few public photographs of him — as if he was shying away from his renown.

The burden of being a Rothschild can be a heavy one. In 1996, one of Mr. Rothschild’s cousins, Amschel, having been asked to fill a leadership position in the family bank in London, hanged himself in a hotel bathroom at the age of 41.

Four years later Raphael de Rothschild, also a cousin, died on a sidewalk in Manhattan at the age of 23 from a heroin overdose.

In the early 1990s, some thought that Mr. Rothschild might also buckle under the weight of the family name. He appeared to be an aimless society playboy with a taste for the slack, unchallenged lifestyle so often embraced by the sons and daughters of Europe’s rich families.

“This is the story of Prince Hal turning into Henry IV,” said Charles G. Phillips, who supervised Mr. Rothschild during his time at the investment firm Gleacher & Company. “He is one of the few sons of great men who has enhanced the family stature and created his own wealth.”

The family legacy was daunting at first for Mr. Rothschild, whose ancestor Nathan Mayer Rothschild helped finance Britain’s victory at Waterloo and whose father, Jacob, split from the family bank in 1980 to begin his own successful career as an investor.

So much so that until he started work as a 25-year-old investment analyst at Gleacher in 1995, Mr. Rothschild avoided it altogether.

He was the life of parties in New York, Paris and London, and in 1995 he eloped to the Dominican Republic with Annabelle Neilson, a free-spirited London socialite with a reputation for dancing on dinner tables in her high heels.

In 1995, when Mr. Rothschild showed up for work at Gleacher, he was still trying to find his way. He was a recent graduate of Oxford, where he had been a member of the exclusive Bullingdon Club, a notorious drinking society known for its rite of wrecking the restaurant furnishings after raucous dinner parties.

With his shabby dress, limited financial experience and energetic social life, he did not make much of a first impression, according to Eric Gleacher, chairman and founder of the bank who is a close friend of Jacob Rothschild, known as Lord Rothschild.

“He was kind of floundering,” Mr. Gleacher said. “I figured he had some big boots to fill.”

While he undertook the drudgery of trainee investment banking work, Mr. Rothschild kept his eyes open for an opportunity more in tune with his growing ambition. In the spring of 1995 he found just that when he left the Gleacher offices in Midtown Manhattan to smoke a quick cigarette a few floors above.

Puffing away in an anteroom, he ran into Timothy R. Barakett, then a 29-year-old investor who was doing the rounds trying to raise funds for Atticus, his new hedge fund. Learning that Mr. Barakett was starting up a fund, he asked for a job. Mr. Barakett turned him down.

But the two men stayed in touch, and in the fall of 1996, Mr. Barakett took Mr. Rothschild on as a minority partner in the nascent fund, then $90 million in assets, and gave him the title of director of business development with a mandate to tap his considerable connections and family connections for new capital.

Mr. Rothschild took to the new opportunity with renewed vigor. He stopped drinking, reached a divorce agreement and devoted his energies to promoting the investment talents of Mr. Barakett.

The fund’s extraordinary performance — since inception it is has grown on average 30 percent a year — made Mr. Rothschild’s job an easy one. Still, some early investors like Peter Munk, the founder and chairman of Barrick Gold, were skeptical at first.

In 2001, he agreed to meet with Mr. Rothschild at the request of Mr. Rothschild’s father, a longtime friend.

“He did not carry the halo of being the future of the family,” Mr. Munk recalled of their brief meeting in the lobby of Claridge’s, the hotel in London. “I wanted to get rid of the boy.”

When Mr. Rothschild said he was a partner in a hedge fund, Mr. Munk had his doubts, assuming that the fund was just a family hedge fund.

“He was indignant,” Mr. Munk recalled. “ ‘My family did not put in one cent,’ he said.”

Mr. Munk would become an investor and a happy one at that. Now, Mr. Rothschild sits on Barrick’s advisory board and is an investor along with Mr. Munk in the TriGranit Development Corporation, a real estate company that invests in Hungary and Eastern Europe and which may go public this year, representing another big payoff.

“This kid is special,” he said. “It’s back to when they were ruling the world.”

With his mix of Old World politesse, a racy appreciation for fast times and the brute force of his accumulating wealth, Mr. Rothschild has become friend and adviser to many — including Russian billionaires, Indian steel magnates and a long list of people who have helped him out during his ascent.

“I will literally get a BlackBerry from him in Siberia asking me how I am doing,” said Glenn Dubin of Highbridge Capital, who was an early investor in Atticus.

To a large extent, the source of Mr. Rothschild’s renewed wealth and influence is tied to the explosive growth of Atticus, where over the last three years assets have surged to $14 billion from $2 billion. (Last year, the fund was up 50 percent before fees, an astonishing return given its considerable size.) In 2005, Mr. Rothschild was paid $80 million in compensation and made more than that last year, according to people with knowledge of his pay arrangement at Atticus.

Now co-chairman, he spends less time raising money for the fund, which is for the most part closed to new investors. But his influence in opening doors for Mr. Barakett, especially in Europe, has been considerable. His Oxford connections came in handy when he pried David Slager, also an Oxford alumnus, away from Goldman Sachs’s risk arbitrage desk in London. Mr. Slager is now Mr. Barakett’s top investing deputy and a vice chairman at the fund.

Mr. Barakett and Mr. Rothschild remain close and speak every day.

“He has had an incredible evolution, and he has done it on his own,” Mr. Barakett said. “It’s not about family connections. He has a knack for identifying talented people and interesting investments.”

By all accounts his relationship with his father is a complicated one. He sits on the board of RIT Capital Partners, Lord Rothschild’s investment trust, and he has never been shy about using the family name to open doors. Still, people who know him say that he is consumed by a furious ambition to live up to, if not surpass, the reputation and doings of his father.

“Being Jacob’s son was difficult for him,” Mr. Dubin said. “But he has matured and is comfortable with himself.”

But, while his rapidly won riches may give him pleasure, it will take more than a billion dollars to live up to the wider social and charitable responsibilities that fall upon a Rothschild baron.

“The family is accomplished in so many different ways,” said Jeffrey T. Leeds, a private equity investor who knows the Rothschilds well. “Nat knows that he would not be fulfilling his responsibilities if he were simply someone who amassed great wealth.”

Now his investments are done through his personal merchant bank called JNR, an entity that is controlled solely by him, in spite of the initials, which stand for Jacob and Nathaniel Rothschild.

It is through JNR, based in London and run by a small crew of investment bankers, that Mr. Rothschild has made his latest investments, prospecting for oil in Ukraine and buying a stake in Diligence, a corporate intelligence firm.

“There is a lot of power behind him, and like all the Rothschilds they use their power with discretion,” said Guy Wyser-Pratte, who has invested with Mr. Rothschild. “I expect him to uphold the family tradition.”
Excerpt 2

Atticus Capital

Atticus Capital Hedge Fund Notes

Record losses is not exactly what most hedge funds are seeking to be known for right now. Anyone keeping up with manager developments right now know that many managers are struggling. Some reports say 2008 is shaping up to be the hedge fund industry's worst performance in 18 years. On some level this is needed, just as recently as last month many hedge funds are still touting their positive performance with barely mentioning their portfolio or business risk controls - over the long-term you must pay attention to more than a goal to return 16+% a year. I'm not saying Atticus is one of these firms, with their size they surely have many controls in place. In general though, I believe the industry needs a shakeout every 7-9 years.

The following piece on Atticus Capital is being published as part of our daily effort to track hedge fund events in the industry. To review other hedge fund related announcements please see our Hedge Fund Tracker Tool.
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Atticus Capital, one of New York’s most powerful hedge funds, has lost more than $5bn (€3.4bn) this year, as its record as one of the world’s top performing money managers was damaged by the credit crunch.

The firm’s two flagship funds fell by a quarter and almost a third by the end of August, marking among the biggest losses in dollar terms ever recorded by a hedge fund. This was as a result of its strategy of taking large, concentrated bets and using few “short” positions betting on a fall in prices to lower risk. Atticus had $14bn under management at the end of July, according to letters to investors, down from a peak of more than $20bn last year.

The losses reflect widespread difficulties for Event Driven Hedge Funds, which aim to buy cheap stocks in the expectation of a catalyst that will boost their value. Atticus, co-chaired by Nathaniel Rothschild, son of Lord Jacob Rothschild, has been closely involved in several of the highest-profile deals of recent years, helping scuttle Deutsche Börse’s bid for the London Stock Exchange and Barclays’ bid for ABN Amro, among other activism.

The Event Driven Hedge Funds Sector – which includes activist investors – was among the most popular with hedge fund investors last year but has seen a race for the exit as investors switch to strategies seen as more likely to prosper during a bear market. Read more...
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Story #2:

According to a media report, Atticus Capital, one of New York's most powerful activist hedge fund the largest investor in Deutsche Börse, has put its entire stake in the German exchange into a special limited vehicle to block redemptions by clients and boost its negotiating strength with management.

According to the report published by the FT.com, the stake of just over 11 per cent held through shares and derivatives, made up almost a fifth of Atticus's funds under management at the start of the year but has since halved in value.

According to the report, the losses have caused concern among some Atticus clients, who have expressed concern about such a liquid stock being put into a "side pocket." The report says that Atticus argues that it wants to be able to represent themselves as solid investors in the German exchange, but the decision has not gone down to well with some of the hedge fund's clients. Read more...

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Story Update #3:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hedge fund company Atticus Capital denied market rumors it was liquidating its positions and closing down and said it had a large net capital position and was looking for investment opportunities, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Atticus's two main hedge funds have been hit with losses of between 25 percent and 32 percent this year through August, but investors are largely sticking with it, according to unnamed investors cited by the Journal. Read more...