Marc Rich

Marc Rich (born Marcell David Reich; December 18, 1934 – June 26, 2013) was an international commodities trader, financier, and businessman. He founded the commodities company Glencore, and was later indicted in the United States on federal charges of tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and making oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. He fled to Switzerland at the time of the indictment and never returned to the United States. He received a widely criticized presidential pardon from President Bill Clinton, on his last day in office; Rich's ex-wife Denise had made large donations to the Democratic Party. Early life Rich was born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium. His parents emigrated with their son to the United States in 1941 via Vichy France to escape the Nazis. His father opened a jewelry store in Kansas City, Missouri, then moved the family to Queens, New York City in 1950, where he started a company that imported Bengali jute to make burlap bags, and later started a business trading agricultural products and helped found the American Bolivian Bank (Banco Boliviano Americano S.A). Rich attended high school at the Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan. He later attended New York University, but dropped out after one semester to work for Philipp Brothers (now known as Phibro LLC) in 1954 where he worked with Pincus Green. Business career At Philipp Brothers, he eventually became a dealer in metals, learning about the international raw materials markets and commercial trading with poor, third world nations. He helped run the company's operations in Cuba, Bolivia, and Spain. In 1974, he and co-worker Pincus Green set up their own company in Switzerland, Marc Rich + Co. AG, which would later become Glencore Xstrata Plc. Nicknamed "the King of Oil" by his business partners, Rich has been said to have expanded the spot market for crude oil in the early 1970s, drawing business away from the larger established oil companies that had relied on traditional long-term contracts for future purchases. As Andrew Hill of the Financial Times put it, "Rich's key insight was that oil – and other raw materials – could be traded with less capital, and fewer assets, than the big oil producers thought, if backed by bank finance.