Soros joins 'locusts' with bank bid

[emad]

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Filed: 26/05/2005)


Legendary financier George Soros is quietly bidding for a crippled German bank, joining the influx of savvy foreign investors snapping up German assets at the bottom of the cycle.

The move is likely to inflame the German Left at a time when Anglo-Saxon hedge funds are being demonised as assset-stripping "locusts".

Mr Soros is reported to have teamed up with Christopher Flowers, a former Goldman Sachs banker, to launch a takeover of the AHBR mortgage bank. The BGAG investment firm, which owns 50pc of the bank stock, is calling for the "highest price" for its share, regardless of political ramifications.

"Given the difficulties of the bank, it would be folly to decide the sale according to political criteria," sources close to the vendors told Financial Times Deutschland.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;sessionid=VU3ODOABSJLW1QFIQMFCM5WAVCBQYJVC?xml=/money/2005/05/26/cnsoros26.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/portal/2005/05/26/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=78955

[getmeouttahere]

1. Isn't Soros one of the American Left's largest....

contributors? The Germans could do a lot worse, seems to me.

[Teaser]

3. Yes, but

let's be honest about what Soros does for a living. He bets *against* the success of institutions and nations, and at times his bets have worsened the straits of those entities. Now this isn't necessarily bad...indeed in a capitalist economy it's a necessity. But it is a little bit unpleasant.

[Frederik]

4. He's funding MoveOn

He doesn't like the way Bush makes the globalization agenda all too obvious. Soros is not always a good guy. He singe-handedly caused a European currency crisis in 1992 with his currency speculation (to be precise, that of his hedge fund Quantum Fund and its manager Stanley Druckenmiller). Those who are conspiratorically inclined see this as a deliberate - and successful - attempt to weaken the D-mark and cause Britain to opt out of the European currency regime (which would become the euro) on behalf of his intelligence connections and his friends in the City of London.

In the Russian business community, Soros is rumoured to be CIA. I don't know about that, but he does play a role in the underground diplomacy of the US with his Open Society and so on. Which isn't necessarily all bad, but not necessarily all good either. He promotes the free-market pro-business agenda for the most part, but he's of course preferable to the PNACers and the neo-cons. They are trying to achieve with military means what Soros tries to achive by more subtle means.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[getmeouttahere]

5. Ever notice that with all the repuke fluff.....

and whining about Clinton and that list of "suspicious" deaths under his watch, that nothing ever came of it. You'd think with all their power and resources that they would be able to come up with something on him with regard to that.

[11cents]

6. I see my message above was removed

God forbid that someone suggest that those who routinely and confidently assert that Tony Blair is a senior KGB agent might be a tad off-base.

Anyway, let me repeat the part that was presumably not objectionable: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was a key participant in the RW "Vince Foster was murdered" campaign, and should not be taken seriously by any DUer.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. You have to pick what you object to on DU, and not make ad hominem attacks

I didn't see your post before it was removed, but you need to realise that making up accusations against public figures isn't actually against the DU rules, and so the only way you can try to refute such an accusation is by replying directly to the made up story (eg saying that the post is wrong, unsubstantiated, or made up - any variation on the word 'lie' is skating on thin ice) - when someone just posts an article from a newspaper, you can only direct your argument to the article in question, and not to the quality of their other posts.

In this case, Evans-Pritchard has taken the basic facts from an FT article, and those in the excerpt seem to accurately say what the FT article says. Since it's subscription only, this is all we can see:

Investors George Soros and Christopher Flowers have expressed interest in buying Germany's trade union owned mortgage lender AHBR, according to sources familiar with the situation.

BGAG, the union's holding company that owns 50 per cent of the bank, is understood to have no objections to selling to a foreign investor despite the hostile political climate in Germany. Franz Münterfering, chairman of the ruling SPD, has branded foreign investors seeking short-term gains in Germany as "locusts".

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c0f094e4-ccb9-11d9-bb87-00000e2511c8.html

The rest of the Telegraph article doesn't actually look controversial - here's a link to it that shouldne't be screwed up by the semicolon: http://www.money.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/05/26/cnsoros26.xml