Yahoo Finance British hedge fund boss takes on Trump's Indian property partners
One of Britain’s most prominent hedge fund bosses is taking on an Indian property company that has partnered with US President Donald Trump on building projects.
TCI head Sir Christopher Hohn and a group of around 400 other investors have demanded that the management team step down at property developer Ireo. It has been alleged that the team stole assets from the company,based in the tech hub of Gurgaon near Delhi, the Financial Times reports.
The shareholder campaign includes hedge funds, university endowment schemes and significant individual investors, and believes that Ireo’s managers have embezzled some of the £1.26bn ($1.6bn) they raised, allegedly using a string of companies to siphon money away to people connected to the company’s managing director, Lalit Goyal.
In turn, Goyal told the Financial Times the claims were “all bullshit” and part of a “classic hedge fund strategy to take over the company from me and give it to somebody else.”
Ireo teamed up with Donald Trump to build an office tower in New Delhi in 2016, leading his son Donald Trump Jr to praise Ireo as “truly a fantastic group”.
Hohn could lose roughly $40m of his own money, and a further $140m invested from his Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), a charitable organisation.
He is joined in the campaign by Axon Capital, an American hedge fund with around $500m in assets. Together with CIFF they hold more than 20% of funds invested with Ireo. Other prominent investors include Indiana’s University of Notre-Dame and Stanford University endowments.
Axon and CIFF sent a letter to investors detailing their criticisms of Ireo, claiming: “We are worried that Goyal [and] Ireo are intentionally creating damage and committing new frauds to cover old ones.”
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The letter continued: “Faced with the prospect of wrongdoing uncovered, they have appeared to be almost intentionally trying to ‘scramble the egg’ and both create damage and shuffle and sell assets and initiate liquidations, to both hide past transactions and to steal money from the company while they can.
“We have pleaded to the [Indian Supreme] Court that they should consider replacing/suspending Goyal, and replacing him on an interim basis with an administrator (likely a retired judge).”
Hohn made the news earlier this week when he earned $274m from his $19bn TCI hedge fund last year.
