Arpad Busson - that name rings a dirty bell.

[Hannah Bell]

[Starry Messenger]

1. He's Uma Thurman's boyfriend.

Also, Elle Macpherson's baby daddy.



I think he looks like a tool.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article7127570.ece

Arpad Busson, chairman of EIM
The hedge fund chief loves giving and glamorous blondes, and his firm has survived a brush with Bernie Madoff. Just don’t call him a playboy
The Andew Davidson Interview

For it’s all too easy to forget he’s a serious businessman, worth £160m, heading EIM, the fund of funds firm he founded in 1992 that now has $8 billion (£5.5 billion) under management. That’s only half its 2008 total but better than it could have been, given the downturn. The slide in assets was hastened by a $230m hit racked up after an investment with Bernie Madoff that seriously damaged EIM’s reputation.

A sign that his outfit doesn’t do proper due diligence? Don’t get him started. He gives me a five-minute lecture on risk management, net asset value calculation, the history of fraud and the work of regulators. Then he shrugs.

“I wish I could say we will never be exposed to another fraud and I bet the regulators wish that, too, but none of us can guarantee it.”

And he admits customers subsequently withdrew funds, but says they were being unrealistic about what could be done to protect against fraud and the effect of the financial crash. That was America’s fault for unravelling the Glass-Steagall Act and allowing mega-banks to emerge, which must now be broken up, he adds.

All of which makes the kudos Busson receives from his philanthropy rather more piquant. While he has battled with worried investors, Ark — Absolute Return for Kids — has continued to galvanise hedge fund giving, and raised £14m at last week’s dinner alone.

Now chaired by Stanley Fink, doyen of hedgies, Ark has moved from being a supplier of grants to being, as Busson puts it, “an implementer”, running eight academy schools here, as well as projects overseas.

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/4802

Michael Gove opens new Globe Academy building
Monday 13 September 2010

Education secretary Michael Gove has been accused of 'breathtaking hypocrisy' for praising investment in the new Globe Academy just weeks after he axed plans to rebuild hundreds of schools across the country.

Mr Gove cut a ribbon to officially open the Deverell Street school before addressing the first assembly in the new building designed by Amanda Levete Architects.

It is two years since former children's secretary Ed Balls launched the new Globe Academy which was formed from a merger of the old Joseph Lancaster Primary School and Geoffrey Chaucer Technology College.

Since then a new school building has been built on the former playground and the previous academic buildings are now being demolished.

Known as the the Paul Marshall Building, the new school is named after the hedge fund millionaire who chairs the academy's board of governors. Mr Marshall is a Liberal Democrat supporter who was a co-author of The Orange Book.

The Globe Academy is sponsored by Ark, the educational charity founded by Arpad Busson.

[Hannah Bell]

2. he was named after this guy...

Dr. Arpad Plesch (purported written by joanne harcourt-smith, timothy leary's girlfriend)

Marisya was her step-father’s toy, a victim of incest since she was a child at the mercy of her mother’s second husband. The man was a wealthy Hungarian Jew who had accumulated a dubious fortune during the war at the expense of less fortunate Jews who sent their money to him in Switzerland for safe keeping while they tried to stay alive in their home countries during the pogroms and exterminations under the madness of the Third Reich. This man Arpad Plesch who called himself an International Financier, created numbered accounts for his so called friends and then pitilessly ransomed them to the Hitler regime for a large commission on their fortunes. As his former friends died in concentration camps the man became richer and richer, playing darker and darker games of evil and domination in a world gone insane.

Much later, I was to learn that my family had a complete lack of values, their genetic memories of belonging burnt away by greed and hatred through the brain damage that occurs from not receiving the proper kind of care and loving in infancy. Generations of neglect by parents for their young had created a group of ruthless monsters that by the year 2.000 were to rule the world spreading famine and disease throughout the African continent, extreme poverty to South America while the other animal worlds disappeared at an alarming speed...



her father's nephew:

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (April 13, 1909 – May 13, 1984) was an American mathematician of Polish-Jewish origin, who participated in the Manhattan Project and originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. He also invented nuclear pulse propulsion and developed a number of mathematical tools in number theory, set theory, ergodic theory and algebraic topology.

Stanislaw Ulam was born in Lwów (Ukrainian: Lviv ; German: Lemberg), Galicia to a wealthy Polish-Jewish banking and timber-processing family<1> who were part of the large Jewish minority population of the city. Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire...

http://h2oreuse.blogspot.com/2009/01/plesch-saga.html

Leary became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier Árpád Plesch. Leary "married" Harcourt-Smith at a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced; she used his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners," Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary.<22> That interpretation of the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."<22>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary


Busson was born in France. His father Pascal Busson was a former French army officer and Algeria veteran, and later turned financier. His mother, Florence "Flockie" Harcourt-Smith, was an English former debutante. Busson's aunt, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, was a companion of Timothy Leary.<3> His parents met in Paris and named their son after the Hungarian-born banker Árpád Plesch (1889–1974), who was not only Florence Busson's stepfather (he was the second husband of her mother, Marysia Ulam Krauss Harcourt-Smith), but also her stepgrandfather (Plesch's first wife was his second wife's mother, Leonie Ulam).<4> Plesch also was a mentor to Italy's richest man, the late head of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli.<5>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Busson

Busson: A hedge fund "hippie"

Busson may be best known for Ark, but he is still the hands-on chairman of EIM, his hedge-funds business.

His father was a stockbroker at JP Morgan in New York in the 1960s and ended up as European head of Lehman Brothers.

Busson's mom's deb party, 1956:


For the showiest party of all, an army of some 60 technicians was called in to transform the ballroom at Claridge's into a moonlit garden so that young Countess "Bunny" Esterhazy and "Flockie" Harcourt-Smith could meet society in proper style. Their parent-step-parents, Hungarian-born Banker Arpad Plesch and his four-times-married wife, laid out an estimated $25,000 to make the evening a success.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,862152,00.html#ixzz10nLjZcAs

[Starry Messenger]

3. Excellent. I hoped you'd find the family tree.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a2IT6Y4JmC48

Busson’s high standing among European investors can be traced partly to his family roots in the world of international finance. His step-grandfather Arpad Plesch was a Hungarian-born financier who married three times. Plesch earned his fortune from businesses around the world, including a large stake in the Haitian-American Corp., which owned sugar plantations.

The Rich Life

Plesch, a lawyer, was famous in the 1930s for suing governments that abandoned the gold standard written into the contracts for international bonds he owned. Busson says Plesch won cases in France and Germany, lost in the U.S. and failed in the U.K. when the House of Lords overturned a potentially lucrative court verdict in his favor.

“The Plesches knew everybody,” says Hugo Vickers, who edited “Horses and Husbands: The Memoirs of Etti Plesch” (Dovecote Press, 2007), the chronicles of Plesch’s third wife. “Arpad Plesch was part of a world of people who are so rich we don’t even hear about them.”

Plesch first married Leonina Ulam, Busson’s great- grandmother, and after she died, married her daughter, Marysia Ulam Harcourt-Smith, who already had a daughter from a previous marriage -- Busson’s mother Florence “Flockie” Harcourt-Smith, an English debutante. Flockie met Busson’s father, Pascal, in Paris in the 1960s. Pascal served in the French army before going into finance, where he opened up European offices for a Wall Street firm called Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan and then headed the French operations of Lehman Brothers.

Le Rosey Alum

Born in Paris, Busson was raised and educated mostly in Switzerland, attending Le Rosey, a boarding school located between Lausanne and Geneva. Known as the “school of kings,” Le Rosey counts among its alumni the late Shah of Iran, the late Prince Rainier III of Monaco and the Aga Khan IV, millionaire head of the Ismaili branch of Islam. In the winter months, the school body moves to a campus in the ski resort of Gstaad. Busson grew up skiing and toyed with the idea of becoming a professional downhill racer. Instead, after school he did a one-year stint in the French army, serving in the Alpine troops.

Busson’s career as a lord of financial middlemen began in the mid-1980s with a casual introduction to Paul Tudor Jones while the two were dining at Indochine, a popular French-Vietnamese restaurant in New York’s East Village. Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp. was the talk of the financial world at the time: it posted returns of 136 percent in 1985 and 99 percent in ’86. Busson began doing freelance marketing for Tudor Jones, now 54, tapping his circle of rich European friends from Le Rosey and beyond.