The biggest donation came from the hedge-fund billionaire and Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who agreed to make a multimillion-dollar gift to coax the biggest name available into a USA tracksuit, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Now, that person is Argentina’s Mauricio Pochettino, who has coached some of the biggest clubs in Europe and secured a 2-0 victory over Panama in his first match in charge on Saturday. He is widely reported to be earning some $3 million a year…. The approach to Griffin, however, only came after U.S. Soccer had made contact with Pochettino and was scrambling for funding. The federation connected with Griffin through another donor who was familiar with Griffin’s love of soccer and long history of donating to soccer causes, including an $8 million gift to build 100 mini-pitches in the Chicago and Miami areas.

The U.S. Soccer Coach Paid for by a Billionaire [WSJ]

“I grew up in a world where we were children of mutually assured destruction,” says Griffin, 53. “It was ‘get under your desk to brace for the impact of a nuclear blast.’ To see us return to the rhetoric of that moment is a huge setback….”

“The continued unfolding of this catastrophe in Ukraine is a giant unforced error by mankind,” he says.

And, as usual in Griffin’s mind, it’s the Democrats’ fault.

The unprecedented moves by Western powers to shut off Russia’s access to capital markets heralds the weaponization of the dollar, he says.

There will be serious repercussions, with Russia, China and others seeing no option but to diversify away from the greenback. De-dollarization by a China-Russia-Iran-Brazil trading bloc could easily morph into the exclusion of American companies and investors from fast-growing markets. “Have we laid the seeds for the setting of the American era of technological superiority?” Griffin asks.

And, as one particular Democrat might put it, that’s something Griffin might not be entirely objective about. But no matter: There’s at least one very good thing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its sanctions-filled aftermath for Griffin: He might get a pretty decent soccer team out of it.

Sky News has learnt that the Ricketts family and the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin have hired Jefferies, the US-based investment bank, to advise on and potentially help finance a formal offer for the Blues.

Jefferies' appointment, alongside that of Lazard - another adviser to the Ricketts-Griffin bid - underlines how Wall Street banks are jockeying for roles on what could be the most lucrative sale of a sports franchise in history.

Billionaire Trader Ken Griffin Navigates A Flock Of Black Swans [Forbes]
Tale of Chinese spying the latest front in Pritzker-Griffin feud [Crain’s]
Chelsea FC sale: Chicago Cubs-owners fortify bid with new bank signing [Sky News]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The American hedge fund which owns AC Milan is among the minority backers of the property developer Nick Candy's takeover bid for Chelsea Football Club.

Sky News has learnt that an affiliate of Elliott Management, the New York-based investor, has agreed to inject a multimillion pound sum into the London side as part of Mr Candy's offer.

The owners of the Chicago Cubs, the Ricketts family, are set to launch a bid for Chelsea after joining forces with the billionaire hedge fund tycoon Ken Griffin…. The Ricketts family have a longstanding interest in Chelsea, having tried to buy the club in 2018, and are confident they will succeed this time. They feel that teaming up with Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel Asset Management, will boost their chances. Griffin, 53, is valued by Forbes at $26.5bn (£20.2bn) and is operating in a private capacity.

Chelsea sale: AC Milan owner Elliott backs Candy offer for London club [Sky News]
Chicago Cubs owners and Ken Griffin join forces in bid to buy Chelsea [Guardian]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Julius Baer Group AG agreed to pay about $80 million to resolve a criminal charge stemming from a U.S. investigation into bribery involving the world soccer federation FIFA.

A subsidiary of the Swiss bank entered into an agreement with prosecutors to defer a money-laundering conspiracy charge during a virtual hearing before a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Thursday….

FIFA and its South American governing body, Conmebol, were victims of the bribery, District Court Judge Pamela Chen said during Thursday’s hearing.

Julius Baer Resolves FIFA-Related Probe by U.S. Prosecutors [WSJ]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

As a consequence of this last, the following appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday.

That’s right: You might have thought that, after the fines, client development costs, fines, client defaults, fines, gut renovations, fines, severance checks and fines, combined with whatever it has to spend on compliance improvements and subpoena responses, and the fact it isn’t making any, that Deutsche Bank wouldn’t have any extra money lying around to spend on a vanity project, if you can call putting your name on the home stadium of a perennially underachieving mid-table soccer team vain—let alone €5.4 million a year for the next seven years (assuming it lives that long). That’s almost €2 million a year more than similarly-but-less-troubled Commerzbank, whose name graced the former Waldstadion for the last 15 years, paid for the privilege, and certainly more than Commerz was willing to pay to continue it. But we guess you can’t really put a price on repeatedly cucking your local rivals.

Now, there is no joy at all, only angst, anger, and confusion. Bury was expelled from the English Football League on Tuesday, ending a 125-year run. Even though Dale found a buyer, the sale to a Brazilian pastor/sports agent was nixed by the league.

Meanwhile, Bolton Wanderers, a club that was in the Premier League as recently as 2012, avoided the same fate on Wednesday, with a sale completed just days before the 145-year-old team was set for liquidation. As it is, Bolton is winless in four League One games this season, was docked 12 points in the standings for having gone into administration and has virtually no hope of avoiding a titanic stumble from the top flight to the fourth division in the span of less than a decade.

This comes at a time of overwhelming success at the top levels of English soccer, as Liverpool squared off with Tottenham Hotspur [ed. note: COYS] last spring in the European Champions League final, while Chelsea defeated Arsenal [ed. note: North London is blue] in the final of the Europa League [which if you’re more of a college football person is kind of like the Citrus Bowl next to the Champions League’s status as the playoff final]. All of that doesn’t even mention that Manchester City, managed by the legendary Pep Guardiola, won the Premier League last spring.

But if you’re not at the pinnacle of the sport, everything is precarious. This was particularly well documented last year in the Netflix documentary “Sunderland ‘Til I Die,” which chronicled the second consecutive relegation of the team where American striker Jozy Altidore famously flamed out before his return to Major League Soccer. As Sunderland foundered in the Championship, longtime staffers from the business office to the team cafeteria were left to wonder about their future employment, all because American billionaire Ellis Short had decided after a long tenure of fiscal mismanagement that he suddenly no longer wanted to put good money after bad. And tough noogies for anyone whose lives were thrown into chaos because of it.

Now, Sunderland, at the other end of League One from Bolton, is looking at a boost in its security with news that members of MSD Partners – Michael Dell’s investment firm – are close to a takeover. Anyone involved with Sunderland knows that there’s always a bit of waiting for another shoe to drop, but things in northeast England are at least looking up for a change.

Sunderland is a 140-year-old club, and like Bury a two-time winner of the FA Cup. Bolton has four FA Cup victories to its credit. The difference between the three teams’ fates is nothing more than the whims of millionaires and/or billionaires, and the willingness of those millionaires and/or billionaires to clean up the messes left behind by previous whimsical millionaires and/or billionaires. Is that really the way that things should be handled, when you consider that this isn’t just about some games, but about civic institutions more than a century old, and especially about the livelihoods of the people working for those institutions?

Am I, maybe, asking this question with a thought in mind about my old colleagues at the New York Daily News, now a shell of its former self after “tronc” cut half the newsroom last summer? Or maybe a little bit with a thought in mind about David Glass cashing in for a billion dollars on the Kansas City Royals, a team whose recent achievements include winning the 2015 World Series and trying to poison customers? Or maybe how Fred Wilpon sure seems like he undervalued the Mets this spring at $1.5 billion, if the Royals are worth a cool billion, when Wilpon bought back 12 percent of the team from a couple of cable companies?

Yeah, maybe all of it. Maybe it’s time to have a nice, long think about all of it, and exactly who should be in control of – and making money from – these things that really are more than just everyday businesses.

As if soccer’s premier club competition wasn’t already enough of a cash cow for Europe’s most successful teams, The New York Times reported a plan is in the works to make it even more exclusive, with two-thirds of the spots locked in from season to season, and huge hurdles put into place for teams from outside the very biggest leagues, something that should rate as a real head-scratcher after the way this year’s Champions League has played out, with Ajax playing its way to the semifinals despite the Dutch league being nowhere near the level of the circuits in England, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy.

From an American professional sports perspective, giving the Champions League a more stable cast would make a lot of sense. But you have to consider European soccer as more comparable to college basketball: regional leagues’ winners all get a chance to play in the biggest competition of the year, with the field filled out by also-ran teams from the biggest leagues. Duke and North Carolina are Real Madrid and Barcelona, if you will, Juventus is Kentucky, and so forth.

The proposed model would make it more like college football, which has five major conferences and only four playoff spots, of which two generally go to the SEC. Ajax’s run through the Champions League this year might have resembled Loyola Chicago in the NCAA Tournament a year ago. In the future? They’re South Florida football, unable to get a seat at the table regardless of how well they play in the games on their schedule.

Why submarine decades of tradition and the grand dream of clubs from across the continent to go toe-to-toe with the giants of the sport, something that exists in international competitions and domestic cups the world over?

Wait, do you really need to ask?

Okay, it’s money. Sweet, sweet money.

Let’s say you’re Paris Saint-Germain, whose ownership group is Qatari Sports Investments, not exactly a group with a vested interest in the health of French soccer as a whole, especially having won Ligue 1 in five of the last six seasons. You’ve got, generously, six interesting games per season on the domestic schedule, and this year in the Champions League you played in the group stage against Liverpool, Napoli, and Red Star Belgrade before going out in the first knockout round to Manchester United. What if, instead, you could be part of a larger and longer group stage in the Champions League, where if this year’s Groups C and D had merged, PSG also would have had home-and-home sets with Porto, Schalke, Galatasaray, and Lokomotiv Moscow? And some of those games could be on weekends instead of beating the living daylights out of Dijon or Toulouse in games hardly anyone cares about or watches?

On that level, what’s being considered makes sense. The problem with that level is that it’s fundamentally about business, that of course Paris-Milan is more broadly appealing than Paris-Nantes, while missing the underpinning aspect of sports, and especially of soccer, that the spotlight must be earned. The last World Cup didn’t include Holland, Italy, or the United States because all failed to qualify, and while it caused consternation in all of those countries, it did not hamper anyone’s ability to compete going forward. For a private club expecting to be in the Champions League and budgeting for the windfall that comes with competing in it, not qualifying is disastrous – hence, the push from some of the biggest clubs to provide themselves with security by closing ranks. It’s a cynical approach that promises awful results for the top domestic leagues and clubs all across Europe, all to sprinkle extra profits across the richest tier of the game and insure the clubs there against their own incompetence in management, which is why, come 2024, this is exactly what you can expect to see put in place.

Welcome to the world of Ivan Gazidis...

The chief executive of English Premier League football club Arsenal has quit for rival AC Milan, months after Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by US billionaire Paul Singer, seized control of the club.
Ivan Gazidis will step down as CEO and resign as a director after a decade at the north London club, with effect from the end of October.

But this actually makes sense to us.

On the one hand, Gazidis is leaving the world's most visible league to work at a club pulling itself out of a confounding debt crisis, is currently sitting 13 out of 20 in the Italian Serie A [a division that is now dominated by a Christiano Ronaldo-led Juventus], and toiling in the hellish reality of Europa League play. All that under the new ownership of a man who has a difficult time not getting exactly what he wants and who has also committed to running the club as a profitable business meaning that purse strings might be taut for time to come, creating an ineffable sense of pre-failure. Even the statement announcing Gazidis' arrival is tinged with Singerian threat...

"Ivan Gazidis is a widely respected, highly talented chief executive, and one we expect can lead the club to realise its full potential.
Together with Elliott’s continued focus on financial stability and proper oversight, we look forward to on-field success and a world-class fan experience."

We actually rank "Running a rebuilding soccer club for Paul Singer" somewhere between "Brian Moynihan's shrink" and "Hank Greenberg's cat nanny" on the "Dealbreaker Worst 100 Jobs in Finance"™ list for 2018.

But, on the other hand, you could work at Arsenal.

Good call, Ivan Gazidis. Best of luck in your new role.

COYS

Arsenal CEO Ivan Gazidis quits for AC Milan [FT]

This means that, like the flagship of the Argentine navy, Paul Singer essentially owns AC Milan, and that unlike the Libertad, the courts are unlikely to take it away from him. Now as we—and, briefly, a soon-to-be-vanquished Singer foe—were delighted to learn, the usually dour hedge fund billionaire has a soft, and uncharacteristically puckish, spot for soccer. That being said, he doesn’t actually want to own a soccer team, least of all one with as many problems as AC Milan. Plus, he likes making money even more than the beautiful game, and with Milan’s value hovering at around twice the €335 million he’s put up, he’s already taking offers for something he technically doesn’t exactly own yet.

The Ricketts family said in a statement in June that it was interested in acquiring AC Milan, one of Europe’s most successful football teams. The owner of the Cubs has held informal talks about a deal with Elliott, a person informed about the talks said….

Elliott, which struck the loan deal with Mr Li under Luxembourg law, is set to own the club after Mr Li failed to repay €32m of a high interest loan owed to the hedge fund before a payment deadline elapsed on Friday evening, said people briefed on the terms of the agreement. If the hedge fund opts to respect the loan terms, the change in control should take less than a week to be made official under Luxembourg law.

Elliott Is Set to Take Full Control of AC Milan Soccer Team [Bloomberg]
US sports investors prepare bids for AC Milan [FT]

Leaving aside a truckload of easy jokes about the U.S. following Russia (this year) and Qatar (2022) in the hosting lineup, this surely will be a big deal for somebody. Maybe for people on the Manhattan side of the Lincoln Tunnel who want to walk through the streets selling bottles of water to drivers who are stuck in traffic on the day of the final?

The dirty not-really-a-secret of the World Cup is that it’s a tremendous boondoggle. Four years ago, Brazil got words of caution from the previous host, South Africa, but by then, of course, it was too late to avoid a future of stories like “Brazil’s World Cup Legacy Includes $550M Stadium-Turned-Parking Lot.” Qatar’s preparations for the next World Cup have basically been a humanitarian crisis. And the current event in the once and maybe future G-8 nation of Russia? No different.

Construction of facilities in North America won’t be so expansive – and therefore dangerous – but there also are questionable decisions like finally making the roof retractable at Stade Olympique in Montreal, at a cost of at least $200 million, 50 years after the stadium hosted the Olympics and two decades after the Expos left town because the building was such a dump. As Montreal city councillor Rosannie Filato noted, that waste of a quarter of a billion or so bucks already was going to happen anyway, though those were not quite her sentiments.

If infrastructure projects, no matter how poorly thought out, are happening regardless of the World Cup, then what’s the big deal?

Well, exactly.

In another place, the World Cup can be an event that an entire hosting country gets wrapped up in. That’s not to say it won’t be a big deal here – it was in 1994, and soccer is much more popular now than it was then in the United States, in part because of that event’s success. It’s just a reflection of what makes an event like the World Cup what it is here.

Consider the scenario for Wednesday, when Uruguay faces Saudi Arabia in a group play game at 11 a.m. Eastern, live from Rostov-on-Don, or maybe the 2 p.m. game between Iran and Spain, in Kazan. Think about the fun of ducking out of work for a long lunch with an oat soda or two, and how good of an event this is for bars and restaurants across America.

Now think about Uruguay vs. Saudi Arabia in a 7 p.m. game in Cincinnati, followed by Iran-Spain coming your way from Edmonton at 10 Eastern. The games will still be on television, of course, but you are more likely to be at home, flipping channels to see if the Mets’ bullpen can hold on to a lead (they won’t) or what’s happening on House Hunters (someone is considering not buying a house because they don’t like the way it’s painted).

In the cities hosting games, it will be exciting for fans to get a chance to go see World Cup games in person, and there will be some tourism benefits, but “hosting the World Cup” sounds a lot sexier than “hosting four or five soccer games between teams from randomly selected countries, requiring an astounding amount of expenditure on security and preparation for a stadium that may not even be full.

The World Cup is an outstanding television event. So is the Super Bowl. New York hosted that once, too, and it was just another thing that happened. That’s a far cry better than Qatar’s situation, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly good for anyone.

Maybe you’re offended by players not standing for the national anthem, or maybe you’re upset by what appears to be the league’s owners shutting out Colin Kaepernick over his protest.

Maybe you’re still distracted by politics outside of football, one of the major excuses offered last year for declining ratings, or maybe you can’t be drawn in by an increasingly mediocre product.

Maybe you can’t watch anymore, knowing in greater detail all the time how the sport ravages the bodies of the players from head to toe, or maybe you’re turned off by how the league has gone soft, everything is a penalty, and you just can’t hit like you used to – unless you’re a cameraman, apparently, in which case you just go out and level cheerleaders now.

Either way, it’s bad enough that even in this era of acting as if facts don’t matter, an NFL spokesman declared last Sunday’s ratings to be “kind of a mixed bag.” In other words, Week 2 in the NFL was terrible for business.

“Fox had a huge audience,” spokesman Joe Lockhart said, as quoted by USA Today. “Especially given there was a weather delay of about an hour.”

It’s true, the game between the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos was held up for an hour because of a thunderstorm, though that’s not really an “even though” situation. Games that run later should wind up getting more viewers, because people are coming home from their Sunday afternoon outings. There’s a reason, after all, that prime time is called prime time – it’s when the most people are in front of their televisions.

The football broadcast that’s regularly in prime time, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, saw its ratings drop in Week 2, as did Fox’s early slate of games, and as did CBS. Meanwhile, people aren’t coming to the games, either, at least in the league’s newest market, Los Angeles, where two professional games could not combine to outdraw Saturday’s college game between USC and Texas.

Monday Night Football did do better in Week 2, but even that Detroit Lions rout of the New York Giants demonstrated another pitfall for the NFL’s 2017 ratings, which is that the five teams in the nation’s three largest media markets are generally terrible, with a combined record of 2-9. That is a temporary problem, but one that comes at a bad time for a league trying to retain eyeballs.

The NFL remains No. 1, but with each passing week that’s a “mixed bag” or worse, it gets easier to see that primacy is not permanent. Just the narrative of football sliding is a dangerous thing for the league. It’s been percolating for some time, yet the league has done little to nothing to stand in the way.

After years of talk about how baseball needs to learn from the NFL, maybe it’s the other way around. Major League Baseball has been doing great business for a long time, yet remains confronted with “baseball is dying” thinkpieces. The response under Rob Manfred has been smart: acknowledge problems, address the identified problems with a series of initiatives like installing clocks to keep coaches’ mound visits brief, but don’t make any truly significant changes because, hey, business is still good.

This is only an option while business is actually good, and the NFL needs to act – or at least appear to act, a lot more than it actually has – while that is still the case.

***

Noted left-wing media outlet ESPN revealed this week that the wealthy are being unfairly taxed?

Yes, it turns out that professional athletes, in this case NBA players, do not really get all of the money that you think they would get as a result of their salaries being publicly listed. It turns out that the top-paid basketball players only take home something in the neighborhood of half that much money, as a result of the government’s sticky fingers – at the federal, state, and even local levels!

Groundbreaking stuff here. Maybe this can be a problem to overcome in the next NBA video game, given that soccer video games now include the possibility for players to sign virtual endorsement deals. Really, though, taxes should be part of soccer video games, given that they’re just another obstaclefor the world’s best players, and also Wayne Rooney.

It would be nice if any old schmuck could hop on E*Trade and profit from any old hunch. But successful trading takes information, and information is scarce. Millions of people around the world get paid to dig up information and trade on it before the hoi polloi does. Big data and algorithms haven't helped matters.

One way out of this bind is making your own new information in the world, which, obviously, you can act on first. If the cost of creating a fact big enough to move a stock is less than both (a) the cost of uncovering existing information, and (b) the potential gains from exploiting that new fact, then it makes sense to go ahead and create that fact. This helps explain all those fake SEC filings for things like Avon getting acquired.

These new facts don't have to be fake, however. Consider the recent bombing of the Borussian Dortmund soccer team in Germany, which killed no one and left one player with a broken wrist. Originally the explosion was blamed on ISIS, but now authorities have pinned it on a Russian-German guy whose only motivation was to build a world that aligned with his portfolio positioning:

The 28-year-old suspect, identified as Sergej W., took out a loan on April 3 worth tens of thousands of dollars in order to finance a bet on a fall in soccer team Borussia Dortmund’s stock price, officials said. The bet included the purchase of 15,000 “put options” in the team’s shares, purchased the same day as the April 11 attack, that would have allowed the suspect to turn a profit on a falling stock price.

This tactic might sound familiar. Back in February we met Florida Man Capital Management, whose president and portfolio manager Mark Charles Barnett devised a scheme to bomb 10 Target franchises up and down the East Coast and then buy the dip when NYSE:TGT suffered an inevitable algo-driven swoon on the bad news. Thankfully the plan failed when his accomplice spilled the beans to the feds.

Even if the bombs had gone off, FMCM's trade was a bit of a gamble. So too were the shorts bought by Sergej W.:

The suspect invested €79,000 ($85,000) in the stock options, which could have brought him a profit of more than €1 million if the team’s share price had plummeted, according to North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Ralf Jäger, the top security official in the state where the attack took place. [...] But on April 12, the first trading session after the attack, Borussia Dortmund stock initially fell but ended the day up 1.7% in line with a broader global stock market recovery.

There is a big lesson here for those who want to blow something up, but only if there's a convincing investment rationale; namely, there isn't a convincing investment rationale for blowing things up. But that doesn't mean there aren't any tradable opportunities in ill-advised acts endangering the public. For instance, one could (but should not) buy gun stocks then shoot up a shopping mall. Or one could (hypothetically) short one's company's own stock then recall 63 percent of the cars it made last year. Or one could bet against a financial product one designed with the intention that it would be sold to rubes then implode. The possibilities are endless!

Dortmund Bomb Suspect Bought Stock Options in Soccer Team Ahead of Attack [WSJ]

During his long career, Elliott Management founder Paul Singer has made his dislikes abundantly clear. They include entrenched boards that won’t do what he wants, the Federal Reserve, the bond market, French laws, uniquely recalcitrant debtors, law firms abetting uniquely recalcitrant debtors, modern radio, hedge fund naysayers, people who share his thoughts with those outside the magic circle, everyone who ran for president last year (even if he’s made peace with the one who won) and Barack Obama.

His known affinities constitute a somewhat shorter list: gold, exploding cell phones, weapons of financial mass destruction, gay marriage and winning. Oh, and, apparently, soccer.

You may have thought, when Singer wore an Argentina jersey to the 2014 World Cup, that he was just having a little fun with the country he’d just forced into a second ruinous default, as he almost certainly was. But there was more to it: The hedge-fund billionaire just loves the beautiful game, and can’t help letting himself go a little at footie’s quadrennial celebration. At least, that is, if you believe Klaus Kleinfeld, who was very definitely on Singer’s dislike list even before he sent the vaguely threatening, definitively ungrammatical letter that got him canned as Arconic CEO.

It was much to my delight when I recently learned from Berlin what a phenomenal soccer enthusiast you must be. Quite a few people who accompanied you in Berlin in 2006 during and especially after the many matches you attended are still full of colorful memories about this obviously remarkable time; it indeed seems to have the strong potential to become lastingly legendary. How you celebrated your soccer enthusiasm and the “great time” you must have had in your Berlin weeks – unforgettable without a doubt – left a deep impression on them.

As a token of my appreciation to learn about this completely “other side” of you, I allow myself to send you a little souvenir, which might bring back some “vivid (hopefully positive) memories”: The official match ball of the FIF World Championships 2006 (called “Teamgeist”, in English “Team spirit”). I would be honored if it found an adequate place on your memorabilia shelfs….

P.S.: If I manage to find a native American Indian’s feather headdress I will send this additional essential part of the memories. And by the way: “Singing in the rain” is indeed a wonderful classic – even though I have never tried to sing it in a fountain.

Having been in Frankfurt during Germany’s 2014 World Cup victory in Brazil—the one to which Singer was wearing his ironic Argentine duds—I can report that singing in fountains is not especially unusual behavior during World Cup month in the Bundesrepublik. As a user of the internet, I can also report that I’m astonished Kleinfeld couldn’t find a feathered headdress to wrap around the soccer ball. In any event, I’d certainly like to hear more about Singer’s fourth-yearly antics. Surely, there must have been a great deal of fun to be had in South Africa in 2010 and South Korea and Japan in 2002, and Paris in 1998 was full of fountains ripe for singing, in the rain or otherwise.

Klaus Kleinfeld letter to Paul Singer [WSJ]
Ousted Arconic CEO Sent Vague Threat, Soccer Ball to Activist Hedge Fund Boss [WSJ]