Juicy embassy ‘row’
Wolff book revives Anna ambassador furor
ANNA Wintour (right) is calling bull---t on President Trump’s claim that when the two met in Trump Tower in December 2016 she asked him for an ambassadorship.
It never happened, a person close to Wintour told our Alexandra Steigrad last week. Wintour, 66, born in London’s affluent Hampstead neighborhood, is an unabashed Democratic fundraiser and a supporter of Hillary Clinton.
The 13-month-old kerfuffle was given a new life on Friday when it was revealed that Michael Wolff, in his red-hot “Fire and Fury,” rehashes the eyebrow-raising meeting.
The Vogue editor and Condé Nast artistic director had “some remarkable chutzpah” to pitch herself to be the US ambassador to the Court of St. James, aka the United Kingdom, Wolff writes.
Trump appeared to entertain the idea. But according to former adviser Steve Bannon, “fortunately, there was no chemistry” between the two, Wolff wrote in his book, which went on sale Friday.
Wolff has it all wrong, the Wintour source said.
“I think it’s pretty clear where Anna stands politically, which makes this laughably preposterous,” the Condé Nast source said. The subject never came up.
On Wall Street, the saying, “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,” cautions against excessive greed. The ditty came to mind this week after private equity pioneer Thomas H. Lee Partners gambled on a higher but riskier offer for its MoneyGram business. They lost.
Here’s what went down, according to our Josh Kosman
Jack Ma’s China-based Ant Financial and Kansas-based Euronet Worldwide got into a bit of a bidding war for THL-owned MoneyGram in 2017. At the time, MoneyGram shares were trading at under $13.
Euronet would end up bidding $15.20, while Ant Financial offered $18 a share.
Scott Sperling — THL Partners’ co-president, who is on the boards of Madison Square Garden and iHeart — and his team opted for Ant’s higher offer even though they were cautioned that it was a riskier bet, sources told our Josh Kosman.
Taking the Euronet offer still would have netted Sperling and his fellow THLers a tidy profit.
The riskier bet last week came back to bite THL. After President Trump’s regulators at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or CFIUS, rejected Ma’s proposal three times — the billionaire businessman walked away from the deal last week.
MoneyGram’s shares, which had soared to $17.92 soon after the Ant proposal was agreed to — but which had slipped slowly to under $13.50 as the likelihood of a deal eroded — fell to $11.71 after Ma ankled the deal. They closed Friday at $12.28, up 4.9 percent, but slipped 2.2 percent in after hours trading.
That leaves Sperling, at least in the short term, looking pretty silly.
Is Euronet still in- terested, and will it come back with its original $15.20 a share offer? Who knows? One source thinks getting the same value would be difficult. THL owns 45 percent of the common stock, which is worth $279 million, and collected roughly $400 million in two secondary stock sales. That is less than the $750 million THL and coinvestor Goldman Sachs invested in the 2008 recap. The timing of the blowup of the deal is pretty bad for THL, which is in the process of raising a new $3 billion fund, and the headline failure can’t help things. THL did not return calls. Rehabilitating bond guru Bill Gross’ tarnished reputation required an explosively worded, $200 million lawsuit against the company he founded, PR guru Michael Sitrick confesses in his recently released book, “The Fixer.” That lawsuit would be the “ideal platform” for getting Gross’ “complete story to the public” after months of being depicted as “erratic, imperious and a liability,” Sitrick writes. Many remember when Gross shocked the investment world in September 2014 by abruptly resigning from PIMCO, the firm he co-founded, following reports of in-fighting with the asset manager’s heir apparent, Mohamed El-Erian. A year later he would sue PIMCO, claiming he was forced out by a “cabal” of greedy execs clamoring for a piece of his compensation. But instead of claiming the expected $200 million for himself, Gross said proceeds would go to charity, another sign that Gross’ focus was on “setting the record straight,” Sitrick writes in the entertaining 278-page tome, The Post’s Carleton English reports.