Paul Singer

01

Founder, president, and co-CEO of Elliott Management Corporation, one of the world's largest activist hedge funds with $65B+ in assets under management; Elliott's sovereign debt strategy involves purchasing the bonds of defaulted or near-defaulting governments at steep discounts on secondary markets (typically 20–30 cents on the dollar), rejecting restructuring offers that impose haircuts on principal, and litigating in US and UK courts under New York and English governing law to obtain full face-value judgments — a model that critics, economists, and some governments characterize as 'vulture fund' behavior that obstructs legitimate sovereign debt restructurings and extracts outsized returns at the expense of ordinary citizens in indebted nations.

02

Elliott's subsidiary NML Capital conducted the most dramatic sovereign debt enforcement action in modern financial history against Argentina following the country's 2001 $100B debt default: having purchased defaulted Argentine bonds at cents on the dollar while 92% of Argentina's creditors accepted a restructuring offering 30–35 cents on the dollar, NML litigated in US courts for 14 years and in October 2012 obtained a Ghanaian court order seizing the ARA Libertad — an Argentine naval training vessel with 220 crew members — in the port of Tema, Ghana as an asset of the Argentine state subject to attachment; Argentina secured the ship's release via a UNCLOS tribunal order in December 2012. The litigation was ultimately resolved in 2016 when Argentina's Macri government paid NML and other holdout creditors approximately $2.4B (versus NML's original ~$45M purchase price) as part of a broader $6.5B settlement with holdout creditors — a return of approximately 53x on investment.

03

Paul Singer is among the most significant donors in American Republican Party politics, having contributed $75M+ to Republican and conservative causes in the 2016 election cycle alone, and has been a major funder of neoconservative foreign policy think tanks including the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Singer's political spending has been extensively documented by campaign finance watchdogs and has included supporting candidates who subsequently adopted policies favorable to financial industry deregulation and reduced oversight of hedge funds and private equity. Singer was also an early and vocal supporter of same-sex marriage within the Republican Party, a position he maintained before it became party consensus.