… when dealing with moneybags hanging around your university in search of respectability. You need to do some vetting before you take their money. You may not be aware of this, but some of the ways people accumulate large personal fortunes are illegal.
Yeshiva University’s distinguished trustees (Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin) are again in the news as yet a third Yeshiva trustee (Moshael Straus) succeeds in wresting some of his stolen cash from Merkin. It’s a convoluted big-time New York City crime story, and Yeshiva probably would have preferred not to feature in it.
In a dissenting opinion, Cravath Swaine & Moore lawyer Rory O. Millson, the member of the arbitration panel chosen by Merkin, found that Straus, a member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees, lied to the arbitrators, including about his knowledge of Madoff acting as a manager for Ascot. He noted that Ascot was referred to as “Bernie” at Yeshiva and that Straus invested in Ascot shortly after joining the university’s board in 1999.
Huh? Don’t try to figure it out. Just a lot of university trustees in each others’ pockets. What’s the point of being a trustee if you don’t get inside access to elite money managers like Bernie and Ezra?
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Well, but now it doesn’t look pretty. It didn’t look pretty when Yeshiva had to do a lot of rapid trustee-erasure, in the wee hours after Madoff and Merkin first got in trouble; and it still doesn’t look pretty with Yeshiva’s name dragged through the long aftermath.
And speaking of long aftermaths — the London School of Economics continues to struggle, not just with its Libyan connections (scroll down), but, more recently, with one of its honorary fellows, Victor Dahdaleh.
On Monday, Mr. Dahdaleh voluntarily surrendered to police in London. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office alleges he paid bribes to officials of a smelting company in Bahrain for contracts with U.S. aluminium giant Alcoa Inc. The deals involved large supplies of alumina, a raw material used to make aluminium, shipped to Bahrain from Australia.
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(Dahdaleh also has long ties to McGill University, but
“I know very little about him,” said a school official who did not want to be named.
Nice try.)