Elliott’s former $2.4bn Argentina man comes after India
Lure of $1.3bn battle brings sovereign bond supremo out of retirement
Unlike Bill Ackman, Paul Singer and Dan Loeb, the name Jay Newman has little household recognition outside of the esoteric world of sovereign debt restructuring.
Until recently, the 69-year-old was enjoying his retirement, split between Florida and upstate New York, after a more than four-decade career on Wall Street. And boy had he earned it. It was Newman who led Elliott Management’s battle to force the Argentine government to pay out on its defaulted debt. The 15-year struggle encompassed the brief capture by Elliott of an Argentine naval vessel crewed by more than 200 sailors in a Ghanaian port in 2012, and the activist fund’s attempted seizure of satellite launch slots that Argentina had agreed with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
When the wager came good for Elliott in 2016 after Argentina agreed to settle the claims of “holdout” creditors, it yielded $2.4bn for the activist. And it earned a place in history as one of the greatest hedge fund trades ever.
Meanwhile, with Newman’s courtroom days behind him — or so he thought — he had been writing a thriller, Undermoney, with a synopsis reminiscent of an Ian Fleming yarn. The book is “an electrifying thriller about a group of American patriots who secretly take over the world’s largest dark money operation with the help of a beautiful female CIA agent”, its publisher claims.
But one siren call proved just too strong for Newman to resist. Our hedge fund correspondent Laurence Fletcher has the inside story on how he has been hired by the shareholders of Devas Multimedia, a satellite and telecoms company embroiled in a fight with the Indian government. Devas is trying to collect $1.3bn it has been awarded by international tribunals after the cancellation of a contract it had with an Indian state-owned company. But the government refuses to pay.
“Time is on the side of creditors,” Newman tells Laurence. “Going to court isn’t fun. But, if that’s what it takes, we do it.”