He was a secretive billionaire who would earn the nickname of "The King of Oil".
In this episode, we'll be talking about the early life of Marc Rich, how he made his fortune, how he got on the wrong side of the US authorities, and the controversial presidential pardon.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man I imagine you might not have heard of.
[00:00:27] Although you might not have heard of him, you almost certainly have bought something he sold, directly or indirectly.
[00:00:35] And we’re not talking about Steve Jobs, or the boss of Nike, or anything like that.
[00:00:40] This man didn’t sell fancy phones, or trainers, or anything particularly luxurious.
[00:00:46] He sold something debatably more important. Oil.
[00:00:51] Today we are going to be talking about a man called Marc Rich, the secretive billionaire who would earn the nickname of The King of Oil.
[00:01:01] It’s a fascinating story that starts with an escape from the Nazis, takes us to America and then brings together Iran and Israel, Fidel Castro, General Franco of Spain, Angola, Apartheid South Africa and Bill Clinton.
[00:01:17] OK then, let’s get right into it and learn about Marc Rich, the King of Oil.
[00:01:26] January 20th, 2001 was a particularly busy day for Bill Clinton.
[00:01:32] It was his last day in the Oval Office, it was his last day as President of the United States of America. In less than 24 hours time, he would pass the mantle to George W. Bush, and with it, his presidential powers would vanish into thin air.
[00:01:50] One of the many perks of being President of the United States is that you have the power to pardon people, to absolve them of criminal charges against them.
[00:02:02] As President, you can do this throughout your term, but your last day in office is clearly the last opportunity you have to do this.
[00:02:11] Much like at school you or I might have waited until the night before the exam and then thought, oh no, there’s a lot of work I need to do, I better get cracking, as far as pardons go, Bill Clinton left a lot to the last minute, he was a very busy man on his last day in office.
[00:02:31] Over the course of his presidency, he pardoned 450 people, but almost a third of these people were pardoned on January 20th, on his last day.
[00:02:43] There were pardons of relatively minor criminals, pardons which didn’t arouse much attention. There were pardons of more controversial criminals, like those of members of a Puerto Rican paramilitary group that had set off bombs in New York and Chicago.
[00:02:58] But the most controversial pardon of all was of a 66-year-old man called Marc Rich.
[00:03:08] Rich didn’t stand accused of blowing anyone up, or of any kind of violent crimes.
[00:03:15] Since 1983 he had been on the run from the US authorities after having been accused of wire fraud, tax evasion and breaking a trade embargo with Iran. He never returned to the United States, so he could never be convicted, but if he had been found guilty he would have been sentenced to up to 300 years in jail.
[00:03:40] He had been cast as an enemy of the state, yet in the days leading up to his pardon, politicians and lawyers from all over the world had petitioned the Clinton administration for a pardon.
[00:03:54] In particular, pressure had come from Israeli politicians. The then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak vouched for him, as did the former Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, who was then the Mayor of Jerusalem but would go on to be the Prime Minister five years later.
[00:04:14] Powerful American tax lawyers had published reports suggesting that Rich wasn’t actually guilty of any crimes.
[00:04:21] And what’s more, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, had given more than a million dollars to the Democratic Party.
[00:04:31] With only hours to spare before the power to pardon would be forever stripped from him, it was announced. Bill Clinton had issued an executive pardon. 18 years later, Marc Rich was no longer a wanted man.
[00:04:48] So, the question you are probably asking yourself is…who was Marc Rich?
[00:04:53] Was he really as bad as he was made out to be, and what did he do to have three Israeli Prime Ministers personally vouch for him?
[00:05:04] His story is as fascinating as it is improbable.
[00:05:10] It’s improbable as Marc Rich was lucky to have survived past childhood. He was born Marcell David Reich in 1934 in an orthodox Jewish family in Antwerp, in Belgium.
[00:05:24] In May of 1940, the five-year-old Marcell Reich was shoved into a car by his father as the family fled from the Nazi invasion of Belgium.
[00:05:35] The family successfully made it to France. If they had been any later, they would most likely have been in the six to ten thousand Jews that were rounded up in Antwerp and sent to concentration camps.
[00:05:49] Eventually the family made it to the United States, where they settled, and Marcell Reich became the more American-sounding Marc Rich.
[00:06:00] Fast forward to 1954, and Rich got a job working at a company called Phillipp Brothers.
[00:06:08] Phillipp Brothers was a large commodity trading company. What this meant was it bought and sold raw materials - metals, minerals, food stuffs, and natural resources. Traders from Phillip Brothers would have relationships with companies all over the world that produced these goods, and they would buy them and sell them to other countries that needed to use them.
[00:06:33] This is called commodity trading, and Marc Rich would go on to become the undisputed king, world emperor, of commodity trading.
[00:06:44] But he started at the bottom, in the mailroom, sorting post.
[00:06:50] It wouldn’t be long before he would prove himself to be capable of much more, and two years later he was a fully-fledged trader, buying tin from Bolivia and selling it all over the world.
[00:07:04] This was in 1956, so it’s worth spending a couple of minutes reflecting on what was going on in the world around this time, and why it was the perfect time for a person like Marc Rich to be getting started.
[00:07:20] So, what was going on? Well, great changes and instability the world over.
[00:07:27] The Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, the Suez Crisis, decolonisation, and regime change all over the world.
[00:07:36] What’s more, this was in a period where communication was not easy.
[00:07:42] Telephone communication was expensive and often connections were poor, especially in developing countries. The commercial fax machine wasn’t even invented until 1964, and of course we are almost 50 years away from email becoming widespread.
[00:07:58] This global instability and difficulty of communication was combined with the start of a period of global economic growth that has continued pretty much ever since.
[00:08:09] So, why was this good news for Marc Rich and his commodity trading colleagues?
[00:08:15] Well, Marc Rich was nominally in the business of buying and selling goods, originally tin, but then other metals, chemicals and raw materials.
[00:08:26] But he was really in the business of information and trust.
[00:08:32] He made money by buying something from someone and then selling it for more money to someone else.
[00:08:39] To do this effectively he needed to do several things.
[00:08:43] For starters, he needed to know where to get that thing from in the first place, he needed to know who would sell it to him.
[00:08:52] Then, he needed to persuade them to actually sell it to him.
[00:08:57] This might sound easy, but when you are talking about tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods, the seller needs to trust that they are going to be paid on time, or at all.
[00:09:10] Thirdly, he needed to be sure that he could sell it for more money than he bought it for.
[00:09:16] Sometimes this was relatively simple, when he already had a buyer set up, so it was merely a case of matching buyer and seller, and pocketing the difference.
[00:09:26] But where the real big money was to be made was on taking calculated risks that the price for something would go up dramatically after he had bought it.
[00:09:37] This is where Rich came into his own, this is what really set Rich apart from his colleagues.
[00:09:44] Yes, he was known as a very fast learner, very trustworthy, and a very hard worker, working 16-hour days, 6 days a week.
[00:09:54] But his real skill was in his ability to spot the direction the world was heading. In a fast-changing world with poor access to information, this would be pivotal to his success.
[00:10:08] The first evidence of this was when he correctly predicted that global demand for the element mercury would spike, it would increase dramatically.
[00:10:18] Mercury was increasingly used for batteries in military equipment, and Rich sensed that the Cold war was hotting up and that countries would be investing in military equipment. He bought as much mercury as he could, and sold it for a large profit when the price rose.
[00:10:37] But his talents didn’t only consist of spotting money-making opportunities. He had an uncanny knack for being able to arrange complicated deals between multiple parties that didn’t just involve paying hard cash for a raw material.
[00:10:54] When he was transferred to Spain, to run the Madrid office, he made influential connections with the fascist regime, and he would be a valuable partner to Spain throughout his career.
[00:11:06] He also started to travel all over South America sniffing out deals, earning himself the reputation of a well-connected middleman who could facilitate trade between two countries that didn’t necessarily want to be seen doing business with one another.
[00:11:23] Probably the most surprising example of this is one that was revealed in a book about his life by the Swiss journalist Daniel Ammann. And that is of Rich helping arrange a deal between Israel and Iran in 1968 to construct an oil pipeline that ran from Eilat, a coastal city in the south of Israel, through to Ashkelon, a port city in the Mediterranean.
[00:11:51] To explain why this was important and surprising in equal measure, relations between Israel and Iran were very tense at the time, even though they were slightly better than they are today.
[00:12:04] Iran officially wouldn’t deal with Israel, as being seen to do so would aggravate its allies.
[00:12:12] To sell its oil to Europe, Iranian tankers needed to pass through the Mediterranean. They had previously gone through the Suez Canal, but in 1967 Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, closed it.
[00:12:28] Iran needed to get its oil to the Mediterranean, but its main route, via the Suez Canal, was now unusable.
[00:12:37] Israel, on the other hand, unlike most of its Arab neighbours, has no oil reserves of its own, or at least basically none. So secretly allowing Iranian oil to pass through its borders, and being able to buy a proportion of it as it went through, was a perfect solution.
[00:12:57] And it would be here, in fact, that Marc Rich would make his name, and the beginnings of his fortune.
[00:13:04] He had practically single-handedly invented what was called the spot market for oil, meaning that oil could be sold at its price that day, rather than be tied up in long-term contracts managed by state-owned companies.
[00:13:18] He was able to act as an intermediary, a middleman, someone who countries could deal with and buy goods from while camouflaging the origin of those goods.
[00:13:30] I imagine it will interest our Spanish listeners to learn that Spain bought oil that had been transported through this Israeli pipeline via Marc Rich, despite Spain having no formal diplomatic relations with Israel until 1986.
[00:13:46] But Spain needed oil, and Israel had it, or at least it was transported through Israel.
[00:13:53] And Marc Rich was the man who was able to facilitate this through his business and political contacts in Spain and in the Middle East.
[00:14:03] And on the subject of business and politics, for Marc Rich business was business, politics only entered into the world of business to facilitate a transaction.
[00:14:15] Time and time again, when other countries or companies avoided doing business in a particular country because of its politics, this didn’t matter for Marc Rich.
[00:14:26] He had broken off from Phillip Brothers, his first and only employer in 1974, and set up his own company, Marc Rich + Co.
[00:14:37] This gave him the ability to make a lot more money than as an employee, and also the freedom to do whatever he wanted.
[00:14:45] He decided to base Marc Rich + Co in the small town of Zug, in Switzerland.
[00:14:52] This might sound like an odd choice. Marc Rich wasn’t Swiss, nor were his key business partners. And Zug is in the middle of the Alps, it’s not exactly New York or London, and it’s not close to a port or anything like that.
[00:15:08] But it would prove to be a very sensible choice. It was in Switzerland, a country famous for its neutrality, a country not prone to sanctioning other countries. For a business that made its money dealing with some pariah states, this was a clear advantage. Oh, and the very low tax rates didn’t hurt either.
[00:15:32] So, in 1974, Marc Rich + Co was founded, and within a couple of years the business was making hundreds of millions of dollars of profit every year.
[00:15:44] Rich and his business partners had an enviable black book of contacts, and over the space of a few years he would supply tens of billions of dollars of commodities, mainly oil, to everyone from Apartheid South Africa to Pinochet’s Chile, Angola to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
[00:16:04] But it would be one deal in particular that would turn him from trading genius into public enemy number one. And this brings us back to his old ally and business partner, Iran.
[00:16:19] To very briefly remind you of some Iranian history, from 1953 to 1979, Iran had been run by a Shah who was labelled as a puppet of the West, a man who had been put back on the throne after an American-sponsored coup.
[00:16:37] Marc Rich had pretty good relationships with people in the Shah’s regime; he made a lot of money, as did his contacts in Iran.
[00:16:46] In 1979 there was the Iranian revolution, or Islamic Revolution, when the leaders of Iran turned their backs on the West.
[00:16:55] In November of the same year, November of 1979 a group of students attacked the US embassy in Tehran, taking American hostages.
[00:17:06] Why this is relevant for our story is that this led to American sanctions against Iran, meaning that the US government forbade its citizens and companies from dealing with Iran.
[00:17:18] But Iran was a key partner for Marc Rich, even after the regime change. And Marc Rich was an American citizen.
[00:17:28] So what did Marc Rich do, did he obey US sanctions, and cut off all dealings with Iran?
[00:17:36] He did not. In fact, he increased his business with the now pariah state, and this is where the decision to base his company in Switzerland becomes important.
[00:17:47] There weren’t technically Swiss sanctions on Iran, so Marc Rich technically could do what he liked. Although Marc Rich the man was an American, Marc Rich + Co, the company, wasn’t an American company, so it didn’t have to abide by US laws.
[00:18:08] Now, legally this might have been fine, but from a public image point of view it would come back to haunt him.
[00:18:16] The American media would later portray him as a billionaire businessman without an ounce of patriotism.
[00:18:23] Back in the United States there was an oil crisis, with prices skyrocketing and petrol stations not having enough petrol for American customers. And there was Marc Rich, an American citizen, dealing with a pariah regime and making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
[00:18:43] But he would soon have bigger problems. In 1981 federal prosecutors received a tip-off about a massive tax fraud at his company, amounting to some 70 million dollars, something like 200 million Euros in today’s money.
[00:19:01] Now, the details of this tax evasion case are quite complicated and kind of boring. It all involves various different companies buying and selling oil to each other to try to take advantage of US government regulation.
[00:19:16] You can look them up if you like, but you don’t need to know them in great detail to understand the story.
[00:19:22] The important thing to underline is that the US government went after Marc Rich, he fled to Switzerland and was never able to return. The case against him was led for several years by Rudy Giuliani, who you may remember as Donald Trump’s slightly eccentric lawyer.
[00:19:42] Back then Giuliani was a little less eccentric, but no less publicity savvy; he managed to turn this case into front page news, and in so doing turn Marc Rich into public enemy number one.
[00:19:58] With the US government on his back, Marc Rich’s ability to run his business was significantly impacted, and he ended up having to sell it to his management team in 1994.
[00:20:09] Now, the terms of the deal have never been revealed, but it’s estimated that Marc Rich made $600 million personally from the sale, over a billion Euros in today’s money.
[00:20:22] Not bad going, but no amount of money would be able to get the US government off his back.
[00:20:29] Or would it?
[00:20:31] Throughout the 1990s there had been increasing pressure on Rich to return to the United States and face criminal charges, even with plots to capture him in Switzerland and bring him back by force. As a result, he had a team of ex-Mossad bodyguards who followed his every move, and there were several narrow escapes.
[00:20:53] It wouldn’t be until January 20th, of 2001, that he finally received the phone call that he'd been waiting almost 20 years for. President Clinton, with only a few hours left as “president”, had granted him clemency, he was no longer a wanted man.
[00:21:12] As you heard at the start of the episode, this was a controversial pardon. He was painted as a tax evading cut-throat businessman who broke sanctions and made billions in the process. If he could buy his way out, what example did this set?
[00:21:28] Now, I should stress that Marc Rich always claimed that he did nothing wrong, that he did not knowingly evade taxes, and there was no legal reason for his Swiss company not to trade with Iran.
[00:21:42] He died in June of 2013, almost exactly 10 years ago, leaving behind a complicated legacy.
[00:21:50] He was first and foremost a trader, a man who put together buyer and seller, asking few questions and casting no judgement. He was the man in the middle, simply providing a service.
[00:22:05] That service was an incredibly valuable one; it turned him into a billionaire.
[00:22:11] At his height, he controlled a large part of the world’s oil supply.
[00:22:16] If you drove in a car, train or aeroplane at any point from 1960 to the mid 1990s, there’s a high chance it was powered by oil sold by Marc Rich.
[00:22:29] Now, you might agree or disagree with his actions and methods, but you have to admit that nobody was more deserving of the nickname “The King of Oil”.
[00:22:43] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marc Rich, the secretive oil billionaire that brokered deals with controversial regimes and got on the wrong side of the US justice system.
[00:22:55] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:59] Had you heard of Marc Rich before?
[00:23:01] How much of a role does politics have to play in business today? Do you think there is a case for someone like Marc Rich, a man who is prepared to do business with any country or regime, no matter what that country might be up to?
[00:23:14] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:18] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:26] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:31] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man I imagine you might not have heard of.
[00:00:27] Although you might not have heard of him, you almost certainly have bought something he sold, directly or indirectly.
[00:00:35] And we’re not talking about Steve Jobs, or the boss of Nike, or anything like that.
[00:00:40] This man didn’t sell fancy phones, or trainers, or anything particularly luxurious.
[00:00:46] He sold something debatably more important. Oil.
[00:00:51] Today we are going to be talking about a man called Marc Rich, the secretive billionaire who would earn the nickname of The King of Oil.
[00:01:01] It’s a fascinating story that starts with an escape from the Nazis, takes us to America and then brings together Iran and Israel, Fidel Castro, General Franco of Spain, Angola, Apartheid South Africa and Bill Clinton.
[00:01:17] OK then, let’s get right into it and learn about Marc Rich, the King of Oil.
[00:01:26] January 20th, 2001 was a particularly busy day for Bill Clinton.
[00:01:32] It was his last day in the Oval Office, it was his last day as President of the United States of America. In less than 24 hours time, he would pass the mantle to George W. Bush, and with it, his presidential powers would vanish into thin air.
[00:01:50] One of the many perks of being President of the United States is that you have the power to pardon people, to absolve them of criminal charges against them.
[00:02:02] As President, you can do this throughout your term, but your last day in office is clearly the last opportunity you have to do this.
[00:02:11] Much like at school you or I might have waited until the night before the exam and then thought, oh no, there’s a lot of work I need to do, I better get cracking, as far as pardons go, Bill Clinton left a lot to the last minute, he was a very busy man on his last day in office.
[00:02:31] Over the course of his presidency, he pardoned 450 people, but almost a third of these people were pardoned on January 20th, on his last day.
[00:02:43] There were pardons of relatively minor criminals, pardons which didn’t arouse much attention. There were pardons of more controversial criminals, like those of members of a Puerto Rican paramilitary group that had set off bombs in New York and Chicago.
[00:02:58] But the most controversial pardon of all was of a 66-year-old man called Marc Rich.
[00:03:08] Rich didn’t stand accused of blowing anyone up, or of any kind of violent crimes.
[00:03:15] Since 1983 he had been on the run from the US authorities after having been accused of wire fraud, tax evasion and breaking a trade embargo with Iran. He never returned to the United States, so he could never be convicted, but if he had been found guilty he would have been sentenced to up to 300 years in jail.
[00:03:40] He had been cast as an enemy of the state, yet in the days leading up to his pardon, politicians and lawyers from all over the world had petitioned the Clinton administration for a pardon.
[00:03:54] In particular, pressure had come from Israeli politicians. The then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak vouched for him, as did the former Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, who was then the Mayor of Jerusalem but would go on to be the Prime Minister five years later.
[00:04:14] Powerful American tax lawyers had published reports suggesting that Rich wasn’t actually guilty of any crimes.
[00:04:21] And what’s more, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, had given more than a million dollars to the Democratic Party.
[00:04:31] With only hours to spare before the power to pardon would be forever stripped from him, it was announced. Bill Clinton had issued an executive pardon. 18 years later, Marc Rich was no longer a wanted man.
[00:04:48] So, the question you are probably asking yourself is…who was Marc Rich?
[00:04:53] Was he really as bad as he was made out to be, and what did he do to have three Israeli Prime Ministers personally vouch for him?
[00:05:04] His story is as fascinating as it is improbable.
[00:05:10] It’s improbable as Marc Rich was lucky to have survived past childhood. He was born Marcell David Reich in 1934 in an orthodox Jewish family in Antwerp, in Belgium.
[00:05:24] In May of 1940, the five-year-old Marcell Reich was shoved into a car by his father as the family fled from the Nazi invasion of Belgium.
[00:05:35] The family successfully made it to France. If they had been any later, they would most likely have been in the six to ten thousand Jews that were rounded up in Antwerp and sent to concentration camps.
[00:05:49] Eventually the family made it to the United States, where they settled, and Marcell Reich became the more American-sounding Marc Rich.
[00:06:00] Fast forward to 1954, and Rich got a job working at a company called Phillipp Brothers.
[00:06:08] Phillipp Brothers was a large commodity trading company. What this meant was it bought and sold raw materials - metals, minerals, food stuffs, and natural resources. Traders from Phillip Brothers would have relationships with companies all over the world that produced these goods, and they would buy them and sell them to other countries that needed to use them.
[00:06:33] This is called commodity trading, and Marc Rich would go on to become the undisputed king, world emperor, of commodity trading.
[00:06:44] But he started at the bottom, in the mailroom, sorting post.
[00:06:50] It wouldn’t be long before he would prove himself to be capable of much more, and two years later he was a fully-fledged trader, buying tin from Bolivia and selling it all over the world.
[00:07:04] This was in 1956, so it’s worth spending a couple of minutes reflecting on what was going on in the world around this time, and why it was the perfect time for a person like Marc Rich to be getting started.
[00:07:20] So, what was going on? Well, great changes and instability the world over.
[00:07:27] The Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, the Suez Crisis, decolonisation, and regime change all over the world.
[00:07:36] What’s more, this was in a period where communication was not easy.
[00:07:42] Telephone communication was expensive and often connections were poor, especially in developing countries. The commercial fax machine wasn’t even invented until 1964, and of course we are almost 50 years away from email becoming widespread.
[00:07:58] This global instability and difficulty of communication was combined with the start of a period of global economic growth that has continued pretty much ever since.
[00:08:09] So, why was this good news for Marc Rich and his commodity trading colleagues?
[00:08:15] Well, Marc Rich was nominally in the business of buying and selling goods, originally tin, but then other metals, chemicals and raw materials.
[00:08:26] But he was really in the business of information and trust.
[00:08:32] He made money by buying something from someone and then selling it for more money to someone else.
[00:08:39] To do this effectively he needed to do several things.
[00:08:43] For starters, he needed to know where to get that thing from in the first place, he needed to know who would sell it to him.
[00:08:52] Then, he needed to persuade them to actually sell it to him.
[00:08:57] This might sound easy, but when you are talking about tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods, the seller needs to trust that they are going to be paid on time, or at all.
[00:09:10] Thirdly, he needed to be sure that he could sell it for more money than he bought it for.
[00:09:16] Sometimes this was relatively simple, when he already had a buyer set up, so it was merely a case of matching buyer and seller, and pocketing the difference.
[00:09:26] But where the real big money was to be made was on taking calculated risks that the price for something would go up dramatically after he had bought it.
[00:09:37] This is where Rich came into his own, this is what really set Rich apart from his colleagues.
[00:09:44] Yes, he was known as a very fast learner, very trustworthy, and a very hard worker, working 16-hour days, 6 days a week.
[00:09:54] But his real skill was in his ability to spot the direction the world was heading. In a fast-changing world with poor access to information, this would be pivotal to his success.
[00:10:08] The first evidence of this was when he correctly predicted that global demand for the element mercury would spike, it would increase dramatically.
[00:10:18] Mercury was increasingly used for batteries in military equipment, and Rich sensed that the Cold war was hotting up and that countries would be investing in military equipment. He bought as much mercury as he could, and sold it for a large profit when the price rose.
[00:10:37] But his talents didn’t only consist of spotting money-making opportunities. He had an uncanny knack for being able to arrange complicated deals between multiple parties that didn’t just involve paying hard cash for a raw material.
[00:10:54] When he was transferred to Spain, to run the Madrid office, he made influential connections with the fascist regime, and he would be a valuable partner to Spain throughout his career.
[00:11:06] He also started to travel all over South America sniffing out deals, earning himself the reputation of a well-connected middleman who could facilitate trade between two countries that didn’t necessarily want to be seen doing business with one another.
[00:11:23] Probably the most surprising example of this is one that was revealed in a book about his life by the Swiss journalist Daniel Ammann. And that is of Rich helping arrange a deal between Israel and Iran in 1968 to construct an oil pipeline that ran from Eilat, a coastal city in the south of Israel, through to Ashkelon, a port city in the Mediterranean.
[00:11:51] To explain why this was important and surprising in equal measure, relations between Israel and Iran were very tense at the time, even though they were slightly better than they are today.
[00:12:04] Iran officially wouldn’t deal with Israel, as being seen to do so would aggravate its allies.
[00:12:12] To sell its oil to Europe, Iranian tankers needed to pass through the Mediterranean. They had previously gone through the Suez Canal, but in 1967 Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, closed it.
[00:12:28] Iran needed to get its oil to the Mediterranean, but its main route, via the Suez Canal, was now unusable.
[00:12:37] Israel, on the other hand, unlike most of its Arab neighbours, has no oil reserves of its own, or at least basically none. So secretly allowing Iranian oil to pass through its borders, and being able to buy a proportion of it as it went through, was a perfect solution.
[00:12:57] And it would be here, in fact, that Marc Rich would make his name, and the beginnings of his fortune.
[00:13:04] He had practically single-handedly invented what was called the spot market for oil, meaning that oil could be sold at its price that day, rather than be tied up in long-term contracts managed by state-owned companies.
[00:13:18] He was able to act as an intermediary, a middleman, someone who countries could deal with and buy goods from while camouflaging the origin of those goods.
[00:13:30] I imagine it will interest our Spanish listeners to learn that Spain bought oil that had been transported through this Israeli pipeline via Marc Rich, despite Spain having no formal diplomatic relations with Israel until 1986.
[00:13:46] But Spain needed oil, and Israel had it, or at least it was transported through Israel.
[00:13:53] And Marc Rich was the man who was able to facilitate this through his business and political contacts in Spain and in the Middle East.
[00:14:03] And on the subject of business and politics, for Marc Rich business was business, politics only entered into the world of business to facilitate a transaction.
[00:14:15] Time and time again, when other countries or companies avoided doing business in a particular country because of its politics, this didn’t matter for Marc Rich.
[00:14:26] He had broken off from Phillip Brothers, his first and only employer in 1974, and set up his own company, Marc Rich + Co.
[00:14:37] This gave him the ability to make a lot more money than as an employee, and also the freedom to do whatever he wanted.
[00:14:45] He decided to base Marc Rich + Co in the small town of Zug, in Switzerland.
[00:14:52] This might sound like an odd choice. Marc Rich wasn’t Swiss, nor were his key business partners. And Zug is in the middle of the Alps, it’s not exactly New York or London, and it’s not close to a port or anything like that.
[00:15:08] But it would prove to be a very sensible choice. It was in Switzerland, a country famous for its neutrality, a country not prone to sanctioning other countries. For a business that made its money dealing with some pariah states, this was a clear advantage. Oh, and the very low tax rates didn’t hurt either.
[00:15:32] So, in 1974, Marc Rich + Co was founded, and within a couple of years the business was making hundreds of millions of dollars of profit every year.
[00:15:44] Rich and his business partners had an enviable black book of contacts, and over the space of a few years he would supply tens of billions of dollars of commodities, mainly oil, to everyone from Apartheid South Africa to Pinochet’s Chile, Angola to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
[00:16:04] But it would be one deal in particular that would turn him from trading genius into public enemy number one. And this brings us back to his old ally and business partner, Iran.
[00:16:19] To very briefly remind you of some Iranian history, from 1953 to 1979, Iran had been run by a Shah who was labelled as a puppet of the West, a man who had been put back on the throne after an American-sponsored coup.
[00:16:37] Marc Rich had pretty good relationships with people in the Shah’s regime; he made a lot of money, as did his contacts in Iran.
[00:16:46] In 1979 there was the Iranian revolution, or Islamic Revolution, when the leaders of Iran turned their backs on the West.
[00:16:55] In November of the same year, November of 1979 a group of students attacked the US embassy in Tehran, taking American hostages.
[00:17:06] Why this is relevant for our story is that this led to American sanctions against Iran, meaning that the US government forbade its citizens and companies from dealing with Iran.
[00:17:18] But Iran was a key partner for Marc Rich, even after the regime change. And Marc Rich was an American citizen.
[00:17:28] So what did Marc Rich do, did he obey US sanctions, and cut off all dealings with Iran?
[00:17:36] He did not. In fact, he increased his business with the now pariah state, and this is where the decision to base his company in Switzerland becomes important.
[00:17:47] There weren’t technically Swiss sanctions on Iran, so Marc Rich technically could do what he liked. Although Marc Rich the man was an American, Marc Rich + Co, the company, wasn’t an American company, so it didn’t have to abide by US laws.
[00:18:08] Now, legally this might have been fine, but from a public image point of view it would come back to haunt him.
[00:18:16] The American media would later portray him as a billionaire businessman without an ounce of patriotism.
[00:18:23] Back in the United States there was an oil crisis, with prices skyrocketing and petrol stations not having enough petrol for American customers. And there was Marc Rich, an American citizen, dealing with a pariah regime and making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
[00:18:43] But he would soon have bigger problems. In 1981 federal prosecutors received a tip-off about a massive tax fraud at his company, amounting to some 70 million dollars, something like 200 million Euros in today’s money.
[00:19:01] Now, the details of this tax evasion case are quite complicated and kind of boring. It all involves various different companies buying and selling oil to each other to try to take advantage of US government regulation.
[00:19:16] You can look them up if you like, but you don’t need to know them in great detail to understand the story.
[00:19:22] The important thing to underline is that the US government went after Marc Rich, he fled to Switzerland and was never able to return. The case against him was led for several years by Rudy Giuliani, who you may remember as Donald Trump’s slightly eccentric lawyer.
[00:19:42] Back then Giuliani was a little less eccentric, but no less publicity savvy; he managed to turn this case into front page news, and in so doing turn Marc Rich into public enemy number one.
[00:19:58] With the US government on his back, Marc Rich’s ability to run his business was significantly impacted, and he ended up having to sell it to his management team in 1994.
[00:20:09] Now, the terms of the deal have never been revealed, but it’s estimated that Marc Rich made $600 million personally from the sale, over a billion Euros in today’s money.
[00:20:22] Not bad going, but no amount of money would be able to get the US government off his back.
[00:20:29] Or would it?
[00:20:31] Throughout the 1990s there had been increasing pressure on Rich to return to the United States and face criminal charges, even with plots to capture him in Switzerland and bring him back by force. As a result, he had a team of ex-Mossad bodyguards who followed his every move, and there were several narrow escapes.
[00:20:53] It wouldn’t be until January 20th, of 2001, that he finally received the phone call that he'd been waiting almost 20 years for. President Clinton, with only a few hours left as “president”, had granted him clemency, he was no longer a wanted man.
[00:21:12] As you heard at the start of the episode, this was a controversial pardon. He was painted as a tax evading cut-throat businessman who broke sanctions and made billions in the process. If he could buy his way out, what example did this set?
[00:21:28] Now, I should stress that Marc Rich always claimed that he did nothing wrong, that he did not knowingly evade taxes, and there was no legal reason for his Swiss company not to trade with Iran.
[00:21:42] He died in June of 2013, almost exactly 10 years ago, leaving behind a complicated legacy.
[00:21:50] He was first and foremost a trader, a man who put together buyer and seller, asking few questions and casting no judgement. He was the man in the middle, simply providing a service.
[00:22:05] That service was an incredibly valuable one; it turned him into a billionaire.
[00:22:11] At his height, he controlled a large part of the world’s oil supply.
[00:22:16] If you drove in a car, train or aeroplane at any point from 1960 to the mid 1990s, there’s a high chance it was powered by oil sold by Marc Rich.
[00:22:29] Now, you might agree or disagree with his actions and methods, but you have to admit that nobody was more deserving of the nickname “The King of Oil”.
[00:22:43] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marc Rich, the secretive oil billionaire that brokered deals with controversial regimes and got on the wrong side of the US justice system.
[00:22:55] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:59] Had you heard of Marc Rich before?
[00:23:01] How much of a role does politics have to play in business today? Do you think there is a case for someone like Marc Rich, a man who is prepared to do business with any country or regime, no matter what that country might be up to?
[00:23:14] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:18] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:26] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:31] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man I imagine you might not have heard of.
[00:00:27] Although you might not have heard of him, you almost certainly have bought something he sold, directly or indirectly.
[00:00:35] And we’re not talking about Steve Jobs, or the boss of Nike, or anything like that.
[00:00:40] This man didn’t sell fancy phones, or trainers, or anything particularly luxurious.
[00:00:46] He sold something debatably more important. Oil.
[00:00:51] Today we are going to be talking about a man called Marc Rich, the secretive billionaire who would earn the nickname of The King of Oil.
[00:01:01] It’s a fascinating story that starts with an escape from the Nazis, takes us to America and then brings together Iran and Israel, Fidel Castro, General Franco of Spain, Angola, Apartheid South Africa and Bill Clinton.
[00:01:17] OK then, let’s get right into it and learn about Marc Rich, the King of Oil.
[00:01:26] January 20th, 2001 was a particularly busy day for Bill Clinton.
[00:01:32] It was his last day in the Oval Office, it was his last day as President of the United States of America. In less than 24 hours time, he would pass the mantle to George W. Bush, and with it, his presidential powers would vanish into thin air.
[00:01:50] One of the many perks of being President of the United States is that you have the power to pardon people, to absolve them of criminal charges against them.
[00:02:02] As President, you can do this throughout your term, but your last day in office is clearly the last opportunity you have to do this.
[00:02:11] Much like at school you or I might have waited until the night before the exam and then thought, oh no, there’s a lot of work I need to do, I better get cracking, as far as pardons go, Bill Clinton left a lot to the last minute, he was a very busy man on his last day in office.
[00:02:31] Over the course of his presidency, he pardoned 450 people, but almost a third of these people were pardoned on January 20th, on his last day.
[00:02:43] There were pardons of relatively minor criminals, pardons which didn’t arouse much attention. There were pardons of more controversial criminals, like those of members of a Puerto Rican paramilitary group that had set off bombs in New York and Chicago.
[00:02:58] But the most controversial pardon of all was of a 66-year-old man called Marc Rich.
[00:03:08] Rich didn’t stand accused of blowing anyone up, or of any kind of violent crimes.
[00:03:15] Since 1983 he had been on the run from the US authorities after having been accused of wire fraud, tax evasion and breaking a trade embargo with Iran. He never returned to the United States, so he could never be convicted, but if he had been found guilty he would have been sentenced to up to 300 years in jail.
[00:03:40] He had been cast as an enemy of the state, yet in the days leading up to his pardon, politicians and lawyers from all over the world had petitioned the Clinton administration for a pardon.
[00:03:54] In particular, pressure had come from Israeli politicians. The then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak vouched for him, as did the former Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, who was then the Mayor of Jerusalem but would go on to be the Prime Minister five years later.
[00:04:14] Powerful American tax lawyers had published reports suggesting that Rich wasn’t actually guilty of any crimes.
[00:04:21] And what’s more, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, had given more than a million dollars to the Democratic Party.
[00:04:31] With only hours to spare before the power to pardon would be forever stripped from him, it was announced. Bill Clinton had issued an executive pardon. 18 years later, Marc Rich was no longer a wanted man.
[00:04:48] So, the question you are probably asking yourself is…who was Marc Rich?
[00:04:53] Was he really as bad as he was made out to be, and what did he do to have three Israeli Prime Ministers personally vouch for him?
[00:05:04] His story is as fascinating as it is improbable.
[00:05:10] It’s improbable as Marc Rich was lucky to have survived past childhood. He was born Marcell David Reich in 1934 in an orthodox Jewish family in Antwerp, in Belgium.
[00:05:24] In May of 1940, the five-year-old Marcell Reich was shoved into a car by his father as the family fled from the Nazi invasion of Belgium.
[00:05:35] The family successfully made it to France. If they had been any later, they would most likely have been in the six to ten thousand Jews that were rounded up in Antwerp and sent to concentration camps.
[00:05:49] Eventually the family made it to the United States, where they settled, and Marcell Reich became the more American-sounding Marc Rich.
[00:06:00] Fast forward to 1954, and Rich got a job working at a company called Phillipp Brothers.
[00:06:08] Phillipp Brothers was a large commodity trading company. What this meant was it bought and sold raw materials - metals, minerals, food stuffs, and natural resources. Traders from Phillip Brothers would have relationships with companies all over the world that produced these goods, and they would buy them and sell them to other countries that needed to use them.
[00:06:33] This is called commodity trading, and Marc Rich would go on to become the undisputed king, world emperor, of commodity trading.
[00:06:44] But he started at the bottom, in the mailroom, sorting post.
[00:06:50] It wouldn’t be long before he would prove himself to be capable of much more, and two years later he was a fully-fledged trader, buying tin from Bolivia and selling it all over the world.
[00:07:04] This was in 1956, so it’s worth spending a couple of minutes reflecting on what was going on in the world around this time, and why it was the perfect time for a person like Marc Rich to be getting started.
[00:07:20] So, what was going on? Well, great changes and instability the world over.
[00:07:27] The Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, the Suez Crisis, decolonisation, and regime change all over the world.
[00:07:36] What’s more, this was in a period where communication was not easy.
[00:07:42] Telephone communication was expensive and often connections were poor, especially in developing countries. The commercial fax machine wasn’t even invented until 1964, and of course we are almost 50 years away from email becoming widespread.
[00:07:58] This global instability and difficulty of communication was combined with the start of a period of global economic growth that has continued pretty much ever since.
[00:08:09] So, why was this good news for Marc Rich and his commodity trading colleagues?
[00:08:15] Well, Marc Rich was nominally in the business of buying and selling goods, originally tin, but then other metals, chemicals and raw materials.
[00:08:26] But he was really in the business of information and trust.
[00:08:32] He made money by buying something from someone and then selling it for more money to someone else.
[00:08:39] To do this effectively he needed to do several things.
[00:08:43] For starters, he needed to know where to get that thing from in the first place, he needed to know who would sell it to him.
[00:08:52] Then, he needed to persuade them to actually sell it to him.
[00:08:57] This might sound easy, but when you are talking about tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods, the seller needs to trust that they are going to be paid on time, or at all.
[00:09:10] Thirdly, he needed to be sure that he could sell it for more money than he bought it for.
[00:09:16] Sometimes this was relatively simple, when he already had a buyer set up, so it was merely a case of matching buyer and seller, and pocketing the difference.
[00:09:26] But where the real big money was to be made was on taking calculated risks that the price for something would go up dramatically after he had bought it.
[00:09:37] This is where Rich came into his own, this is what really set Rich apart from his colleagues.
[00:09:44] Yes, he was known as a very fast learner, very trustworthy, and a very hard worker, working 16-hour days, 6 days a week.
[00:09:54] But his real skill was in his ability to spot the direction the world was heading. In a fast-changing world with poor access to information, this would be pivotal to his success.
[00:10:08] The first evidence of this was when he correctly predicted that global demand for the element mercury would spike, it would increase dramatically.
[00:10:18] Mercury was increasingly used for batteries in military equipment, and Rich sensed that the Cold war was hotting up and that countries would be investing in military equipment. He bought as much mercury as he could, and sold it for a large profit when the price rose.
[00:10:37] But his talents didn’t only consist of spotting money-making opportunities. He had an uncanny knack for being able to arrange complicated deals between multiple parties that didn’t just involve paying hard cash for a raw material.
[00:10:54] When he was transferred to Spain, to run the Madrid office, he made influential connections with the fascist regime, and he would be a valuable partner to Spain throughout his career.
[00:11:06] He also started to travel all over South America sniffing out deals, earning himself the reputation of a well-connected middleman who could facilitate trade between two countries that didn’t necessarily want to be seen doing business with one another.
[00:11:23] Probably the most surprising example of this is one that was revealed in a book about his life by the Swiss journalist Daniel Ammann. And that is of Rich helping arrange a deal between Israel and Iran in 1968 to construct an oil pipeline that ran from Eilat, a coastal city in the south of Israel, through to Ashkelon, a port city in the Mediterranean.
[00:11:51] To explain why this was important and surprising in equal measure, relations between Israel and Iran were very tense at the time, even though they were slightly better than they are today.
[00:12:04] Iran officially wouldn’t deal with Israel, as being seen to do so would aggravate its allies.
[00:12:12] To sell its oil to Europe, Iranian tankers needed to pass through the Mediterranean. They had previously gone through the Suez Canal, but in 1967 Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, closed it.
[00:12:28] Iran needed to get its oil to the Mediterranean, but its main route, via the Suez Canal, was now unusable.
[00:12:37] Israel, on the other hand, unlike most of its Arab neighbours, has no oil reserves of its own, or at least basically none. So secretly allowing Iranian oil to pass through its borders, and being able to buy a proportion of it as it went through, was a perfect solution.
[00:12:57] And it would be here, in fact, that Marc Rich would make his name, and the beginnings of his fortune.
[00:13:04] He had practically single-handedly invented what was called the spot market for oil, meaning that oil could be sold at its price that day, rather than be tied up in long-term contracts managed by state-owned companies.
[00:13:18] He was able to act as an intermediary, a middleman, someone who countries could deal with and buy goods from while camouflaging the origin of those goods.
[00:13:30] I imagine it will interest our Spanish listeners to learn that Spain bought oil that had been transported through this Israeli pipeline via Marc Rich, despite Spain having no formal diplomatic relations with Israel until 1986.
[00:13:46] But Spain needed oil, and Israel had it, or at least it was transported through Israel.
[00:13:53] And Marc Rich was the man who was able to facilitate this through his business and political contacts in Spain and in the Middle East.
[00:14:03] And on the subject of business and politics, for Marc Rich business was business, politics only entered into the world of business to facilitate a transaction.
[00:14:15] Time and time again, when other countries or companies avoided doing business in a particular country because of its politics, this didn’t matter for Marc Rich.
[00:14:26] He had broken off from Phillip Brothers, his first and only employer in 1974, and set up his own company, Marc Rich + Co.
[00:14:37] This gave him the ability to make a lot more money than as an employee, and also the freedom to do whatever he wanted.
[00:14:45] He decided to base Marc Rich + Co in the small town of Zug, in Switzerland.
[00:14:52] This might sound like an odd choice. Marc Rich wasn’t Swiss, nor were his key business partners. And Zug is in the middle of the Alps, it’s not exactly New York or London, and it’s not close to a port or anything like that.
[00:15:08] But it would prove to be a very sensible choice. It was in Switzerland, a country famous for its neutrality, a country not prone to sanctioning other countries. For a business that made its money dealing with some pariah states, this was a clear advantage. Oh, and the very low tax rates didn’t hurt either.
[00:15:32] So, in 1974, Marc Rich + Co was founded, and within a couple of years the business was making hundreds of millions of dollars of profit every year.
[00:15:44] Rich and his business partners had an enviable black book of contacts, and over the space of a few years he would supply tens of billions of dollars of commodities, mainly oil, to everyone from Apartheid South Africa to Pinochet’s Chile, Angola to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
[00:16:04] But it would be one deal in particular that would turn him from trading genius into public enemy number one. And this brings us back to his old ally and business partner, Iran.
[00:16:19] To very briefly remind you of some Iranian history, from 1953 to 1979, Iran had been run by a Shah who was labelled as a puppet of the West, a man who had been put back on the throne after an American-sponsored coup.
[00:16:37] Marc Rich had pretty good relationships with people in the Shah’s regime; he made a lot of money, as did his contacts in Iran.
[00:16:46] In 1979 there was the Iranian revolution, or Islamic Revolution, when the leaders of Iran turned their backs on the West.
[00:16:55] In November of the same year, November of 1979 a group of students attacked the US embassy in Tehran, taking American hostages.
[00:17:06] Why this is relevant for our story is that this led to American sanctions against Iran, meaning that the US government forbade its citizens and companies from dealing with Iran.
[00:17:18] But Iran was a key partner for Marc Rich, even after the regime change. And Marc Rich was an American citizen.
[00:17:28] So what did Marc Rich do, did he obey US sanctions, and cut off all dealings with Iran?
[00:17:36] He did not. In fact, he increased his business with the now pariah state, and this is where the decision to base his company in Switzerland becomes important.
[00:17:47] There weren’t technically Swiss sanctions on Iran, so Marc Rich technically could do what he liked. Although Marc Rich the man was an American, Marc Rich + Co, the company, wasn’t an American company, so it didn’t have to abide by US laws.
[00:18:08] Now, legally this might have been fine, but from a public image point of view it would come back to haunt him.
[00:18:16] The American media would later portray him as a billionaire businessman without an ounce of patriotism.
[00:18:23] Back in the United States there was an oil crisis, with prices skyrocketing and petrol stations not having enough petrol for American customers. And there was Marc Rich, an American citizen, dealing with a pariah regime and making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
[00:18:43] But he would soon have bigger problems. In 1981 federal prosecutors received a tip-off about a massive tax fraud at his company, amounting to some 70 million dollars, something like 200 million Euros in today’s money.
[00:19:01] Now, the details of this tax evasion case are quite complicated and kind of boring. It all involves various different companies buying and selling oil to each other to try to take advantage of US government regulation.
[00:19:16] You can look them up if you like, but you don’t need to know them in great detail to understand the story.
[00:19:22] The important thing to underline is that the US government went after Marc Rich, he fled to Switzerland and was never able to return. The case against him was led for several years by Rudy Giuliani, who you may remember as Donald Trump’s slightly eccentric lawyer.
[00:19:42] Back then Giuliani was a little less eccentric, but no less publicity savvy; he managed to turn this case into front page news, and in so doing turn Marc Rich into public enemy number one.
[00:19:58] With the US government on his back, Marc Rich’s ability to run his business was significantly impacted, and he ended up having to sell it to his management team in 1994.
[00:20:09] Now, the terms of the deal have never been revealed, but it’s estimated that Marc Rich made $600 million personally from the sale, over a billion Euros in today’s money.
[00:20:22] Not bad going, but no amount of money would be able to get the US government off his back.
[00:20:29] Or would it?
[00:20:31] Throughout the 1990s there had been increasing pressure on Rich to return to the United States and face criminal charges, even with plots to capture him in Switzerland and bring him back by force. As a result, he had a team of ex-Mossad bodyguards who followed his every move, and there were several narrow escapes.
[00:20:53] It wouldn’t be until January 20th, of 2001, that he finally received the phone call that he'd been waiting almost 20 years for. President Clinton, with only a few hours left as “president”, had granted him clemency, he was no longer a wanted man.
[00:21:12] As you heard at the start of the episode, this was a controversial pardon. He was painted as a tax evading cut-throat businessman who broke sanctions and made billions in the process. If he could buy his way out, what example did this set?
[00:21:28] Now, I should stress that Marc Rich always claimed that he did nothing wrong, that he did not knowingly evade taxes, and there was no legal reason for his Swiss company not to trade with Iran.
[00:21:42] He died in June of 2013, almost exactly 10 years ago, leaving behind a complicated legacy.
[00:21:50] He was first and foremost a trader, a man who put together buyer and seller, asking few questions and casting no judgement. He was the man in the middle, simply providing a service.
[00:22:05] That service was an incredibly valuable one; it turned him into a billionaire.
[00:22:11] At his height, he controlled a large part of the world’s oil supply.
[00:22:16] If you drove in a car, train or aeroplane at any point from 1960 to the mid 1990s, there’s a high chance it was powered by oil sold by Marc Rich.
[00:22:29] Now, you might agree or disagree with his actions and methods, but you have to admit that nobody was more deserving of the nickname “The King of Oil”.
[00:22:43] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marc Rich, the secretive oil billionaire that brokered deals with controversial regimes and got on the wrong side of the US justice system.
[00:22:55] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:59] Had you heard of Marc Rich before?
[00:23:01] How much of a role does politics have to play in business today? Do you think there is a case for someone like Marc Rich, a man who is prepared to do business with any country or regime, no matter what that country might be up to?
[00:23:14] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:18] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:26] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:31] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
