Financier received controversial pardon
GENEVA — He was a wheeler-dealer pardoned by another consummate dealmaker, a working-class Jewish boy who left Belgium to escape the Nazis and rose to become the billionaire “King of Commodities.”
Marc Rich’s connections to the rich and powerful not only made him fabulously wealthy but when he was indicted for fraud, racketeering and tax evasion on a grand scale, they helped secure him a pardon from Bill Clinton, hours before the U.S. president left office.
That triggered a political firestorm from critics who alleged Mr. Rich bought his pardon through donations that his ex-wife had made to the Democratic Party.
Mr. Rich died Wednesday of a stroke at a hospital in Lucerne, near his home for decades. He was 78, and his Israel-based spokesman Avner Azulay said he would be buried Thursday in a kibbutz in Israel.
Throughout his storied career at the pinnacle of high finance, Mr. Rich was known as a man who could deliver the big deals thanks to personal relationships he had forged with powerful figures around the world.
In a rare 1992 interview with NBC, Mr. Rich said that in his business, “we’re not political ... That’s just the philosophy of our company.”
Yet Mr. Rich cultivated contacts with powerful politicians — in the Middle East as well as the United States — and used those ties to make billions, often when it seemed all doors were closed.
During the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, Mr. Rich used his Middle East contacts to purchase crude oil from Iran and Iraq and made a fortune selling it to American companies.
In 1981, Mr. Rich and a partner bought 20th Century Fox and three years later he sold his interest to Rupert Murdoch for $250 million.
But in 1983, while he was in Switzerland, Mr. Rich was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on more than 50 counts of fraud, racketeering, trading with Iran during the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and evading more than $48 million in income taxes.
At the time it was the largest tax evasion case in U.S. history and could have earned him more than 300 years in prison.
Although the Swiss refused to arrest or extradite Mr. Rich, he stayed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, narrowly escaping capture in Finland, Germany, Britain and Jamaica, until Clinton granted him a pardon on Jan. 20, 2001 — the day he handed over the keys to the White House to George W. Bush.
Critics believed the case showed justice means one thing for ordinary people and another for powerful insiders.
Rich had other advocates, however.
For years influential Israelis, including ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the former chief of the Mossad spy agency, Shabtai Shavit, had been urging Clinton to pardon Mr. Rich, who had contributed up to $80 million to Israeli hospitals, muse- ums, symphonies and to the absorption of immigrants.
Moreover, Federal Election Commission records showed that Mr. Rich’s exwife, songwriter Denise Rich, had donated $201,000 to the Democratic Party in 2000.
At the time, Rich’s lawyers were urging the U.S. to drop the tax evasion case. When the Justice Department refused to negotiate, Mr. Rich’s attorneys turned to Clinton.
Federal authorities investigated but found no evidence of wrongdoing. Election officials also dismissed a complaint accusing Denise Rich of donating campaign money and furniture to Hillary Clinton in exchange for the pardon.
Nevertheless, the current U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, who was deputy attorney general under Clinton, told a House committee weeks after the president’s decree that if he had known all the facts of the case, “I would not have recommended to the president that he grant the pardon.”
Mr. Rich married for a second time, to German-born Gisela Rossi, in 1998. They divorced in 2005.