Let me start out by saying my firm has blocked Leveraged Burnout on our network, so I’m blogging from my phone. Apologies if there are typos, rambling sentences or any weird formatting issues.
“Bloomberg – HNA Group Co. and SkyBridge Capital have agreed to drop the Chinese conglomerate’s plan to acquire the investment firm.“
Anthony Scaramucci: everyone’s favorite hedge fund giant and real life short guy. There was a time when The Mooch had it all. After a bunch of fundraising for then-presidential candidate Trump, he was finally offered the position of White House Director of Communications after the Sean Spicer experiment. As is normal for cabinet members, he began to divest of assets that could conflict with his duties as a cabinet member, in this case, his stake in the well known fund-of-funds he built, SkyBridge Capital (actually a solid shop, did business with them at one point). The deal was valued at $180M, which would net Scaramucci about $100M at closing.
Anyway, he oddly chose to sell the firm to HNA, a giant Chinese conglomerate, and subject the transaction to CFIUS (which is a council that decides to approve or deny material foreign investments into U.S. companies). This was pretty dumb because after all the Trump-China campaign rhetoric, The Mooch decided to sell out to the Chinese tax free in front of the whole world. Predictably, the whole thing became a drawn out mess because of how high profile the sale was. It also didn’t help that he told a reporter what he really thinks about Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, leading to him being unceremoniously (but hilariously) fired after 10 days in office.
Welp, that all leads us to yesterday’s developments, where SkyBridge and HNA decided the CFIUS process was too laborious and expensive and moved to kill the deal. So now The Mooch is out $100M and will be returning to the firm he built, which I suppose isn’t the worst thing. Maybe he’ll do the right thing and give Gary Cohn a job, too.
P.S. – Tell me this guy’s tenure at the White House didn’t play out exactly like you thought it would.
