Vulture funds – the key players
Profiles of the people using courts in Jersey to claim hundreds of millions of pounds from the world's poorest countries
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Michael Sheehan, the director of the vulture fund Donegal International. Photograph: Guardian
Michael Sheehan
The director of the vulture fund Donegal International likes to be known as Goldfinger, after the James Bond villain, and has a penchant for expensive Cadillacs.Donegal owns a $15m (£9.5m) Zambian debt, dating back to 1979, which was originally purchased from Romania in 1999 for $3m. Once in possession of the debt, Donegal began demands from Zambia, which handed over $2.5m before the firm sued them in the UK for defaulting. The high court awarded Donegal $15.5m in 2007 despite the judge's concerns that Sheehan was "cavalier in presenting his evidence". An experienced lawyer, Sheehan has worked at law firms in Washington DC and Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Incongruously, he spent most of the 1990s as a counsel to a debt relief NGO before setting up Debt Advisory International (DAI), a firm that advises vulture funds. DAI was instrumental in brokering the deal between FG Management in the acquisition of Congolese debt from Bosnia.
Peter Grossman
A former Morgan Stanley consultant, Grossman is the co-founder of the vulture fund FG Hemisphere, now FG Capital Management. Like Sheehan, Grossman and his now deceased partner Keith Fogerty are trained lawyers and set up an advisory firm for investors in the developing world in the 1990s.Grossman has successfully sued the DRC for $100m after acquiring debts owed to Bosnian state company EnergoInvest for $2.6m. The sale was signed off by the former Bosnian prime minister, Nedzad Brankovic, who has been investigated on corruption charges relating to his tenure at EnergoInvest. FG Management has chased its claim on the DRC's debt around the world's courtrooms, from Hong Kong to the US. Last November in Jersey FG's claim on $108.3m of Congolese money was successful. At present representations are being made to the Jersey government to ensure that this does not happen again. The privy council will meet on 8 December to discuss the issue.Paul Singer
Singer is a major donor to the US Republican party and the founder of Elliott Management, which controls about $17bn from its Manhattan offices, including a 17% stake in UK company National Express. Elliott's principle investment strategy is buying distressed debt cheaply and selling it at a profit or suing for full payment. In 1995 it bought defaulted Peruvian bank debt for $20m and successfully sued for $58m.A subsidiary of Elliott, Kensington International, bought a $30m debt owed by Congo-Brazzaville at a cut-down price, and was awarded more than $100m in interest in 2002 and 2003. Singer has so far managed to seize $39m of the country's oil sales. Another firm affiliated to Elliott, NML Capital, is currently trying to recoup at least $182m bought from Argentina before it defaulted in 2002.
• This article was amended on 16 November 2011, to clarify that DAI is Debt Advisory International and on 17 November 2011 to correct a reference under Paul Singer's profile from the DRC to Congo-Brazzaville
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