Still time for HEB insiders to repent!!-> How a former IRA man ‘saved’ Germany’s ‘anti-Christ financier’ German financier Florian Homm went from wolf of Wall Street to repentant lamb after discovering the Virgin Mary in prison, with Irish help
 Florian Homm: “The path I took for 30 years made me one of the world’s richest Germans, but it brought me nothing on the inside.” Photograph: Christof Koepsel/Bongarts/Getty Images
If anyone makes a film of Florian Homm’s life, the pitch to the backers would be: “German Wolf of Wall Street encounters the Virgin Mary and has Saul-to-Paul conversion.”
It’s a three-act drama, still unfolding, about an ambitious and aggressive financier on a turbo capitalism rocket ride who made a lot of money and enemies, then crash-landed, lost everything and learned the oldest lesson of them all: money can’t buy happiness.
Along the way four Irish people – three real, one fictional – played key roles in changing the life of this tanned, two-metre-plus man with intense brown eyes.
“The path I took for 30 years made me one of the world’s richest Germans, but it brought me nothing on the inside,” says Mr Homm by way of introduction as he prowls the stage of a small auditorium in Erding, near Munich.
He’s here to warn students of a local management school not to follow his example. The only problem is that the more yarns he spins – his rescue of Dortmund soccer club; his stake in Europe’s largest brothel in Berlin; how he survived an assassination attempt in Caracas – the more his student audience regard him with silent rapture. In the buttoned-down world of German business they will eventually join, Florian Homm remains notorious as the “anti-Christ financier”.
In his speech, and our interview later, it’s clear Mr Homm knows how to relate anecdotes from his life with the same take-no-prisoners style in which he originally lived them. But it’s less clear whether he realises how blurry the lines are in his world: between fact and fiction, legal and illegal, profane and sacred. Driving forceBorn in 1959, Mr Homm grew up in Bad Homburg near Frankfurt as a member of the Neckermann mail-order dynasty. A self-made millionaire at 22, with six languages under his belt, he passed quickly through Harvard Business School and worked at US and Swiss banks before becoming a driving force in Germany’s “Neuer Markt” stock market for new economy shares. When the dot-com bubble burst he set up the Mallorca-based hedge fund Absolute Capital Management Holdings (ACM) with Donegal man Sean Ewing.
The fund had several billion under management until 2007 when Mr Homm sold his shares abruptly and disappeared. The ACM shares collapsed and US authorities put out an arrest warrant for Mr Homm on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud. The central charge is of “portfolio pumping”: buying and selling lightly-traded shares via entities he controlled with the aim of inflating his hedge fund’s value and pocketing illicit profits.
The allegations prompted Swiss authorities to have frozen assets reportedly worth tens of millions, accusing him of spreading the rest among friends before going underground. Mr Homm denies the charges and says Mr Ewing and the rest of ACM board colluded in his absence to make him the scapegoat for their own guilt.
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