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EFTA01204416 | EFTA01204432 In an apparent attempt to fix its relationship with Libya—which, after all, had proven to be supremely profitable—Goldman Sachs then offered to pay a $50 million fee to a Dutch fund called Palladyne International Asset Management, through which the LIA had already invested $300 million. Goldman could hardly have been interested in Palladyne because of the fund's financial acumen: According to an audit conducted on behalf of the LIA, 45 percent of the funds, virtually all from Libya, invested in Palladyne were held in cash, while the rest of the investments didn't do particularly well: "To date we have paid in excess of $3.8m in fees, for losing us $30 million," an LIA investigator noted in a report. What made Palladyne notable was that it was owned by Ismael Abudher, whose father-in-law Shukri Ghanem was the longtime head of Libya's National Oil and a trusted member of Qaddafi's inner circle. In April 2012, shortly after Qaddafi's death, Ghanem was found floating face-down in the Danube River in Vienna. Palladyne did not immediately respond to comment. According to a detailed lawsuit filed in March in U.S. District Court in Connecticut by a trader named Dan Friedman, who was hired by Palladyne in 2011, the company "lacked both the management competence and the infrastructure to manage money." Friedman, who's suing the recruiter who hooked him up with the firm, alleges in the complaint that, "Palladyne was the asset management company equivalent of a Potemkin village, fronting for a kickback and money-laundering scheme." The complaint offers an unusually intimate account of a corporate mirror world in which recruitment meetings, trading strategies, and the company's vaunted "man-and-machine" trading model were used as props to disguise good, old-fashioned theft. Palladyne's true purpose, Friedman alleges, was to serve as the investment bank version of the fake betting joint in the film The Sting, while laundering "money defalcatedfrom Libyan government oil revenues by thefamily andfriends of Muammar Ghaddafi" and serving as the "recipient and guardian of bribes and kickbacksfrom companies doing business with the Ghaddafi regime (or hoping to do business with them) or the state oil company run by Abudher'sfather-in-law." According to reports published in the financial press, the SEC is investigating whether Goldman's payment to Palladyne violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "People were making crazy amounts of money for introductions to the Libyans," says Mohammed Rashid, an Iraqi-born Kurd based in London, who arranged the meetings between Blair and Seif. Rashid is now a financial adviser to wealthy individuals and entities from the Middle East and to Europeans and Americans who wish to do business with them. According to him and others who have direct knowledge of those transactions, paying money to fixers, matchmakers, advisers, and consultants was a common practice, and such connections were eagerly sought. One London banker says consulting fees for such transactions could range anywhere from 2 percent to 5 percent of the initial investment. None of which would have mattered as much if the performance of the investments wasn't so dismal. And if the West relieved Libya of a decent-size share of its national wealth in the years immediately before NATO toppled the dictator, the situation today is even worse. In April 2012, Mohsen Derregia, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham Business School, was appointed chairman and chief executive officer of the LIA following what he describes as "totally a freak accident"—an accident that left him in charge of what, at an estimated $66 billion, was still one of the most valuable investment portfolios on the planet. (That the portfolio remains somewhere near its original value is no triumph in a market that has almost tripled from its low five years ago.) Derregia's area of academic specialization was accounting, and he knew nothing about finance. On the other hand, he was honest. He was soon forced out of the job and replaced by Ali Mohamed Salem Hibri, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Libya, which took effective control of the LIA in April 2013. EFTA01204432 Epstein Web iOS app on the App Store.
May 13, 2026 at 8:32 AM