“Times are changing and today marks the twilight of financial acrobats”

QFourteen years after his arrest and two years after his death in prison, Bernard Madoff is entitled to posthumous glory: a documentary series in four episodes on Netflix, available from this Wednesday, January 4. Each crisis, like a receding sea, brings out new and sulphurous figures, sorts of black wolves of capitalism whose glorious then sinister destiny has been the honey of novelists and filmmakers since Balzac. The heroes of Pyre of vanitiesby Tom Wolfe, marked the incipient stock market madness of the 1980s. Madoff, that of 2008.

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Who will be the heroes of the novel of the 2020s? Across the Atlantic, the most spectacular is Sam Bankman-Fried, ex-cryptocurrency star, arrested for fraud in December 2022 after the collapse of his company FTX. Returned to his parents, with a bond of 250 million dollars (236 million euros), he decided, Tuesday, January 3, to plead not guilty at his next trial, which promises to be a great show.

In Europe, a good candidate could be Lars Windhorst. A serial entrepreneur, he was nicknamed the “German Bill Gates” on the threshold of the 2000s when, still a teenager, he had been creating companies in electronics since 1993. He then racked up bankruptcies and rebounds in a mad rush. Miraculously surviving the crash of his plane in Kazakhstan in 2007, he went into personal bankruptcy the same year. Two years later, he was prosecuted by the courts of his country for fraud and breach of trust. This does not prevent him from setting up a new company, financial this time. Taking advantage of the abundant money provided by central banks, he became an investor and bought the famous Italian lingerie brand La Perla in 2018.

panicked investors

It was at this time that his career crossed that of Bruno Crastes, creator in London in 2010 of the asset manager H2O, co-owned by the French bank Natixis. Recognized as one of the star investors in 2015, the Frenchman from the City joins forces with Lars Windhorst in the takeover of La Perla. And his fund, which had specialized in very liquid assets, hence its name H2O, has committed more than 1 billion euros in the activities of the German grouped in his renamed company Tennor. By pointing out, in 2019, the links between the respected Londoner and the sulphurous German, the FinancialTimes triggers a panic among H2O investors. The health crisis and then the stock market debacle will bring down all these little people who are today fighting for their survival.

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