Billionaire speculator George Soros, the man who ‘broke the Bank of England’, is believed to be in line to make millions from the collapse of the United Kingdom’s second-biggest construction firm.
Carillion, which also manages facilities such as prisons and 50,000 homes for military personnel through public sector contracts, went into liquidation on Monday.
Collapsing under the weight of £1.5 billion debt, including a £587 million pension shortfall, the company was left with just £29 million before going bust. The company employs 43,000 staff globally, 20,000 of which are based in the UK, where most of its business is focused, including construction workers, hospital cleaners, and energy and utility personnel.
However, amidst the job losses and affected public services, 12 hedge funds have made £200 million short-selling shares in Carillion, including an investment vehicle linked to George Soros, according to regulatory data collated by Castellain Capital as reported in The Times.
Short selling is where investors borrow shares for a fee and sell them in hopes of buying them back at a later date if the share price falls, making a profit, before returning the security to its original owner.
Soros benefitted before from short-selling the construction giant when his SFM UK Management shorted Carillion stock in the summer, allegedly earning the hedge fund $2.5 million from its short position.
The billionaire, whose network of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) lobby for progressive, leftist agendas around the world, infamously sold short sterling in 1992 which had a profound effect on the UK’s economy, resulting in the British government pulling the currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on Black Wednesday (16 September 1992).
The Hungarian-American speculator then became known for a time as “the man who broke the Bank of England”.
Soros has also made bets on other countries’ economies through his Quantum Fund, one of the world’s first hedge funds, including short selling the currency in Thailand in 1997, triggering a financial crisis that plunged much of Southeast Asia into a depression.
Then-prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad branded the hedge fund owner a “criminal” and slamming him for undermining “all these countries [that] have spent 40 years trying to build up their economies”.
The globalist ‘philanthropist’ recently vowed to renew his fight against nationalism after transferring $18 billion of his own wealth into his Open Society Foundations in October.