Who Are My Investors?
I&#x27;ve come across this problem a few times when running a hedge fund. To what degree does one care where the money came from, aside from following AML rules? I get the feeling you only write articles like that if you have more people wanting to invest than you have capacity for.<p>- A friend called, asking for a recommendation for a job he was applying for. And advice about whether it was worth taking. Turned out, it was the firm that managed Libya&#x27;s (ie Gaddafi&#x27;s) wealth. They were making a big push at the time and needed a software developer. Was I going to tell him not to take the job? How complicit are you if you write some exchange connectors for a dictator? He ended up taking it, and they ended up in the news.<p>- A gulf state sovereign fund called. We didn&#x27;t even flinch to take it. I think we just assumed they had a lot of oil money and didn&#x27;t think any further about it. If you read the news, there&#x27;s some not nice things about the place. Treating manual laborers badly, lack of proper rule of law, that sort of thing. Took the money, didn&#x27;t think about it much. Not sure I would act differently now, to be honest. Basically the business needed the investment, and there wasn&#x27;t anything specific and horrible to tell us not to.<p>- And where do you draw the line? What if a benevolent, enlightened, prosperous but essentially a dictatorship state from the equator wants to invest? And they could well claim to be a democracy. You&#x27;d be in endless discussions about which investors to take, which presumably 99% of your competitors would not have a problem with.<p>- The family office of a guy who&#x27;d been in jail called. He was known to have made his money in a seedy way, and tended to have large guys standing around guarding him. I doubt if he actually was a gangster, just seemed to like having a certain tough-guy air about him. Were we going to turn him down? Again, business requirements prevailed. Basically, if it&#x27;s legal to take his money, most people will do so.<p>If someone does something horrible like with this journalist, and you are an organisation that is large enough to have a PR footprint, you might care. If you&#x27;re just a small fish, you are always going to have huge pressure to take the cash. I know what my partners would have done if I&#x27;d put up any resistance in these cases; they&#x27;d have just ground me down with endless rationalizations, and we&#x27;d have ended up doing exactly the same. People always find reasons to do what they have decided to do, and not in that order.