(Roughly) Daily

All of us make mistakes. But some of us are in a position to make more consequential mistakes than others. Ava Benny-Morrison and Sridhar Natarajan illustrate…

The indictment reads like a cinematic plot: A Harvard Fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK-47s, Stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan’s government. What they lacked was enough cash.

Now, Jane Street co-founder Robert Granieri concedes he put up the money — saying he was duped into funding the alleged coup plot. The role played by the wealthy recluse behind a Wall Street trading powerhouse emerges from the US prosecution of Peter Ajak, the Harvard Fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself atop the East African nation.

“Granieri is a longtime supporter of human rights causes,” his lawyer said in a statement. “In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions.”

The case came to light in March 2024, when federal prosecutors in Arizona charged Ajak and Abraham Keech with conspiring to illegally export arms to their home country. Both have pleaded not guilty.

While prosecutors haven’t said where the defendants obtained several million dollars for an attempt to buy military-grade weaponry, Ajak’s lawyers pointed to Granieri in a recent filing — saying the 53-year-old financier was “vital to the plan.”

“Without the significant financing that Mr. Granieri could and agreed to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible,” they wrote in the document filed in late May.

The lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two Black men, even though support also came from Granieri and Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian dissident. The US hasn’t accused either of them of wrongdoing.

Kasparov came to know Ajak when the chessmaster was chair of the Human Rights Foundation. He later connected Ajak with Granieri, according to people familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified discussing the legal case…

… To industry outsiders, Jane Street is probably best known as the former employer of Sam Bankman-Fried, before he left to build a crypto empire that imploded.

But across Wall Street, the market-making firm is a source of fascination — known for turning mathematicians into traders who mint profits. It generated $20.5 billion in net trading revenue last year, helping it leap past the likes of Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.

Despite Jane Street’s ascent in the industry, Granieri has kept a low profile. He’s one of the firm’s four founders — and the only one still there. Yet he’s not featured on the company’s website, and public photos of him are scarce.

The firm’s success has allowed Granieri to pour money into other ventures and causes. He helped build the Scarlet Pearl, a casino resort on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, was a major financial backer for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, and has donated to the Equal Justice Initiative and Institute for Justice. He also channeled money into causes Kasparov backed around the globe…

The remarkable tale of a secretive financier’s funding of a planned coup in the world’s youngest country: “Jane Street Boss Says He Was Duped Into Funding AK-47s for Coup,” gift article from @bloomberg.com‬.

See also “BCG modelled plan to ‘relocate’ Palestinians from Gaza” (a gift article from @financialtimes.com‬):

Boston Consulting Group modelled the costs of “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza and entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to help launch an aid scheme for the shattered enclave, a Financial Times investigation has found. The consulting firm helped establish the Israel- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and supported a related security company but then disavowed the project, which has been marred by the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians, and fired two partners last month. BCG’s role was more extensive than it has publicly described, according to people familiar with the project, stretching over seven months, covering more than $4mn of contracted work and involving internal discussion at senior levels of the firm.

[Two months before BCG took the gig, US President Donald Trump had suggested emptying the shattered strip of its 2.2mn people so it could be rebuilt as the “Riviera of the Middle East” — a plan rights groups and UN officials equated to ethnic cleansing. As for the disaterously ineffective GHF, the UN has described it as a “fig leaf” for Israeli war aims and humanitarian groups have refused to co-operate with it.]

More than a dozen BCG staff worked directly on the evolving project — codenamed “Aurora” — between October and late May. Senior figures at BCG discussed the initiative, including the firm’s chief risk officer and the head of its social impact practice.

The BCG team also built a financial model for the postwar reconstruction of Gaza, which included cost estimates for relocating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the strip and the economic impact of such a mass displacement. One scenario estimated more than 500,000 Gazans would leave the enclave with “relocation packages” worth $9,000 per person, or around $5bn in total.

BCG said the senior figures were repeatedly misled on the scope of the work by the partners running the project. Referring to the work on postwar Gaza, BCG said: “The lead partner was categorically told no, and he violated this directive. We disavow this work.”…

See also: “Tony Blair’s staff took part in ‘Gaza Riviera’ project with BCG.”

* “Albus Dumbledore” in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (by J.K. Rowling who doesn’t figure into this post as she has embraced, not denied her cultural/political funding/activities)

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As we think twice, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that, after 20 years of civil war, South Sudan gained its independence and seceded from Sudan.