Personal Finance – This guest column is written by Ian Hamilton, the founder and chief executive of the IDS Group, a specialist administration company that administers over R60 billion in hedge funds, private equity and unit trust funds. Hamilton warned the Financial Services Board seven years ago about the dangers of the Relative Value Arbitrage Fund.
In 2009, I sounded a warning to pension fund trustees at their annual convention about unregulated alternative investment schemes, following the collapse of Bernie Madoff’s US$50-billion fraud. Many of Madoff’s investors were smart people who believed that what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme was a legitimate hedge fund.
