New York Post – A white shoe New York hedge fund has invested in a Chinese copper company whose management has an eye-popping history of stock problems and regulatory woes.
Ospraie Management, a $7 billion New York hedge fund run by Tiger Management veteran Dwight Anderson, invested $5 million in Terra Nostra Resources, a company that says it is in the stainless steel and copper-processing businesses.
Also throwing their hats – and wallets – into the ring are two London hedge funds: troubled mortgage manager Cheyne Capital and $600 million Lionheart, which invested $5 million and $2 million, respectively.
The $1.2 billion Ospraie Special Situation Fund’s $5 million gets it an 8.9 percent stake according to a recent SEC 13-D filing.
But a review of Terra Nostra management’s vast regulatory footprint shows that Ospraie might also have purchased some headaches down the road.
Terra Nostra Chief Executive James Po – he has long done business using the name “Poe”- and his ex-wife Paula were involved in the 1980s and 1990s with some spectacular failures: a Chinese prawn-farming business and peddling an arm-wrestling machine.
In 2005, the British Columbia Securities Commission fined the couple for failing to properly disclose their trades in the shares of Pan Asia Mining, which they had touted as China’s only working diamond mine. Despite the sanction, Mrs. Poe was later caught trading shares in an account set up in her housekeeper’s name.
