Former Tory donor shares in £445m payday at hedge fund
A FORMER top Tory donor has been handed a multimillion-pound windfall after profits at his hedge fund soared.
Chris Rokos, who gave about £2m to the Conservative Party between 2009 and 2015, shared in a £445m pay pot distributed among his hedge fund’s 20 members last year, newly filed accounts show.
The billionaire financier personally took home £26.7m from Rokos Capital Management in 2023.
Rokos Capital manages $16bn (£12.6bn) on behalf of investors and reaped large rewards from bets that interest rates would rise in 2022.
The fund endured a rocky start to 2023 after being wrong-footed by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank but recovered to post a strong gain for the year as a whole.
Operating profit at the hedge fund jumped from £12.9m to £462.8m in the year to March 31 2023, newly filed accounts show, while revenue increased more than fivefold from £119.7m to £643.5m.
Rokos Capital is known for macro trading, an investment approach that seeks to profit from large-scale trends in stocks, bonds, currencies and derivatives. Eton and Oxford-educated Mr Rokos set the company up in 2015. Mr Rokos first made his name as a star trader for hedge fund chief Alan Howard, the billionaire founder of Brevan Howard. Mr Rokos left to manage his own money in 2012 before setting up Rokos Capital. The 53-year-old, who is worth an estimated £2bn, is known for his philanthropy, donating to organisations including human rights group Amnesty International and Wateraid, an international non-profit aimed at ending the global water, sanitation and hygiene crisis.
In 2020, Rokos Capital pledged cash to help fight racial discrimination in the wake of the Black Lives Matters movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd.
Mr Rokos has also funded scholarships at Oxford University’s Pembroke College and supported a five-year fellowship at London’s Institute of Cancer Research.
The financier, who supported Britain remaining in the EU, last donated to the Conservative Party in 2018 when he gave the party £70,000. Mr Rokos, who rarely gives interviews, is thought to have bought Domenichino’s 1620 painting, St John the Evangelist, the Financial Times reported. A spokesman for Rokos Capital declined to comment.