Chelsea Clinton’s hedge fund boss husband has refused to apologize to investors despite losing nearly $25 million in a calamitous gamble on the Greek economy.
Marc Mezvinsky, 38, persuaded clients to pour cash into the struggling European country in the hope it would bounce back and deliver massive profits.
But after buying up government debt and bank stock, the dramatic upturn he and his partners predicted failed to materialize and the fund’s value plunged by an estimated 90 percent.
Mezvinsky and former Goldman Sachs colleagues Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon are reported to have finally pulled the plug on the failed investment last month.
The Stanford graduate also declined to issue an apology to Eaglevale investors, who are said to include a string of wealthy Clinton backers and campaign contributors.
Casually dressed in blue jeans and a grey polo shirt, Mezvinsky said he had ‘nothing to say’ before dashing inside the swank 5,000-square foot residence overlooking Madison Square Park.
It seems unlikely that he and Chelsea, 36 pregnant with the couple’s second child will be left out of pocket, however, as hedge fund bosses typically pick up management fees in spite of losses.
Former investment banker Mezvinsky and his high-rolling partners started up their multi-million dollar venture, Eaglevale named after a bridge in Central Park – in 2011, one year after his marriage.
They control an estimated $330 million portfolio of so-called global macro funds, where traders try to make money by predicting major financial and political events.
Mezvinsky’s former boss of eight years, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein, was one of the first high-profile investors.
Others are said to include a number of wealthy Clinton family supporters, some of whom have contributed campaign money to either Bill or Hillary, according to The New York Times.
Among them is leading financier, Marc Lasry, co-founder of $13 billion hedge fund Avenue Capital, where Chelsea worked after graduating from Stanford.
‘I gave them money because I thought they would make me money,’ Mr Lasry told The Times last year, after investing $1 million in Eaglevale and urging a relative to do the same.
Mezvinsky and his partners had written to clients in 2014 to declare confidence in their ‘Hellenic Opportunity’ fund, predicting that Greece was on the path to a ‘sustainable recovery’.
They had collected $25 million by then but stopped taking money by the end of that year when it became clear the country’s economy would collapse without a massive Eurozone bailout.
The fund had reportedly lost about 40 percent of its value by early 2015 and yet was not closed down until last month, according to The New York Times, which cited two anonymous investors.
The failure is a huge personal blow to Mezvinsky, who is also the son of political figures, albeit less well known that his wife’s famed parents.
His father, Edward Mezvinsky, represented Iowa’s 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms in the 1970s and his mother, Marjorie Margolies, represented Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1995.
Ed Mezvinsky pleaded guilty to 31 charges of felony fraud in 2001 and spent five years in federal prison after he admitted scamming his friends and family out of $10 million in a Ponzi scheme.
