Auric Goldfinger's Short List Message Board

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Non-Tech : Auric Goldfinger's Short List

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To: JEB who wrote (599)	10/31/1998 9:45:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (1) of 19428

Foundation is the Blumenthal-Wolfensohn Foundation (Blumenthal ran Unisys and is a friend of Jim's) which gives money to worthwhile charities-it is not a GST (Generation Skipping Trust) or anything like it. The operations of that trust are staffed by people whose job it is to distribute the money. Jim was never involved with it on a day to day basis anyhow (maybe the names are reversed, I cannot recall). As for your link to Fortune, I can cite a much more compelling story that was published by Forbes Magazine in 1988 where Wolfensohn was on the cover and the article praised Jim for being one of the most honest men ever on Wall Street. Perhaps the Forbes website has it archived. The article cited several cases wherein Wolfensohn told investment banking clients not to do a given deal because in his opinion it would not be a good thing for the acquirer he represented. If you know anything about that business, that sort of honesty is entirely unheard of because investment bankers are largely compensated only when a deal is actually closed (which explains a lot about the crap Wall Street cobbles together) I can personally attest to that and if you have read my posts at all, you will understand that those words do not come easily from me. Although I do not know for sure if Wolfensohn knows the head of Deutsch Bank, it would not surprise me as HongKong Shanghai Bank was a client of JDWI when Jim ran it. The man knows a lot of very influential people and that he is working for the Worldbank and using those relationships to eradicate poverty around the world is a good thing in my mind. As for the BT shares themselves, perhaps they were never put into the predecessor blind trust that held the JDWI private company shares. While I admit that the story does paint a potential possibility of the look of impropriety, I again can assure you that value of the shares is inconsequential to Jim's wealth. When he left JDWI to go to the World Bank he had a net worth estimated by others to be conservatively in excess of $100 M. He is truly an honest man and I can only tell you that I think it would be very difficult to find someone that you would trust more than him with regards to financial issues. (Rubin and Greenspan would be on par)

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