Bronte Capital: A dark privatised social security story: Astarra, the missing money and how examining a fund manager owned by Joe Biden’s family led to substantial regulatory action in Australia

The link to Paradigm Global was what raised my eyebrows. Paradigm is an asset manager (for funds of hedge funds) owned by Hunter Biden and James Biden. These are the Vice President’s son and brother respectively. I have written about Paradigm extensively before as it has an unfortunate habit of being associated with scams. Absolute Alpha was not difficult to do due diligence on. It took me only 40 minutes to work out that they were needing very close scrutiny. It does not speak well to the due-diligence of a fund of hedge funds (which is what Paradigm claims to be) that they keep being associated with cases like this.

The Biden connection was what prompted me to look at Absolute Alpha and hence what led me to write my “Markopolos letter” to ASIC and hence what rapidly led to the closure of Astarra and Trio. It is worth asking how deep that connection is.

This could get quite interesting.