Marc Rich was one of the world’s most influential commodity traders, a veritable godfather of the business, whose former colleagues now run two of the world’s largest trading firms, Glencore and Trafigura. His business philosophy – he once told an interviewer “you can’t run a business on sympathies otherwise you’d be hampered” – was worthy of a villain in the works of Ian Fleming or Eric Ambler. He specialised in dealing with outcast countries, selling oil to everyone from Pinochet and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to apartheid-era South Africa, ensuring that for years his name appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. Yet he was pardoned by President Clinton just before he left the...
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