Who Are My Investors?
I'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's (ie Gaddafi'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't even flinch to take it. I think we just assumed they had a lot of oil money and didn't think any further about it. If you read the news, there'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't think about it much. Not sure I would act differently now, to be honest. Basically the business needed the investment, and there wasn'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'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'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'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'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'd put up any resistance in these cases; they'd have just ground me down with endless rationalizations, and we'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.