Reply #40: Excellent. I hoped you'd find the family tree.

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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.