Kuwait’s Banks Brace for Property Crash
1 February, 2016
Is the Shareholder Everything?
1 February, 2016Euromoney, February 2016
If you want an illustration of the challenges ahead for Iran in this brave new post-sanctions world, take a look at the first fund to be launched since EU sanctions were formally lifted: the Turquoise Variable Capital Investment Fund, a joint venture between Iranian investment group Turquoise and the London-based emerging markets asset manager Charlemagne Capital.
Though formally only launched on January 18 as sanctions came off, a fund presentation has been doing the rounds since at least November, and a diagram it provides on money flows is illuminating. The fund is incorporated in Cyprus, and banked by a financial institution in Georgia, with back office support from a brokerage in the UAE and accounting through a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. It then has a Cypriot wholly-owned subsidiary, which gets its money into Iran via Dubai exchange bureaus, before going through an Iranian broker into the Tehran Stock Exchange and the Central Securities Depository of Iran. Oh, and the money goes from the investor to the fund bank account in euros, in cash.
As one person who has seen the presentation notes: “There is absolutely no way I could get that past my compliance people.” Little wonder that the fund is not available to US investors.
