KL Group...Bayou Management...Liberty Corner Advisors...Wood River...If you follow hedge funds - and really in investment today, what could be hotter than hedge funds - these are the names that keep you up at night. In order to avoid biting into the next bad apple many individual and institutional investors are turning to corporate investigators such as ourselves to vet investment opportunities.

Via Reuters:

Scandals make hedge fund sleuthing pay off -experts

October 12, 2005
By Svea Herbst-Bayliss

BOSTON - Back-to-back hedge fund scandals are sending investors a frightening message: Spend a few thousand dollars now to sidestep a multimillion-dollar fraud later. Lawyers and investigators said this week that the collapse of hedge fund Bayou Group and suspected fraud at hedge fund Wood River Partners likely will prompt investors to take more precautions before stepping into the fast-growing $1 trillion industry.

"The circle of who has gotten burned is getting bigger and the trend is that people will ask for more due diligence because they realize it pays to conduct these inquiries," said Peter Turecek, who manages the hedge fund business at Kroll, a New York-based security consulting firm. Financial regulators are sorting out what went wrong at Bayou, where investors are said to have lost $300 million, and Wood River, which once said it was managing $500 million.

Investors and lawyers have not been able to reach Wood River in the last few days, and in a lawsuit filed by Lehman Brothers against Wood River, the Wall Street investment bank said that it suspected the hedge fund ceased operating. Wood River is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

These are the latest blowups in an industry that has attracted billions of dollars from pension funds, endowments and charities since becoming a hot asset class by delivering outsized returns in the late 1990s and positive returns during the stock market's almost three-year sojourn in bear territory.

Many investors, particularly funds of funds like Glenwood Capital Investments and Mesirow Financial that select hedge fund portfolios, already rely on investigators to snoop around and verify a manager really is who he says he is. For fees ranging between $2,000 and $50,000, firms will compile dossiers that can turn up anything from unpaid parking tickets to lawsuits to lies on resumes.

"Getting reports on managers shows that for $2,000 up front, you can avoid people like this instead of having to spend hundreds of times that amount to recoup millions of dollars in losses later," said Randy Shain, executive vice president of First Advantage CoreFacts LLC, which investigates hedge funds. "It is cheap insurance," he added.

Still, there are plenty of investors who pick managers based on a gut feeling and who consider due diligence a cost -- heaped on top of hedge funds' already hefty fees -- that is not part of their investment, lawyers and investigators said. But these are the people who might come around now, they added. "Every time there is a fraud, investors profess to do more due diligence and this is no different," said Scott Berman, a partner at law firm Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman.

Those who still trust their gut may change their minds after hearing what firms like First Advantage CoreFacts turned up. This summer, a report on Wood River founder John Whittier showed the former technology analyst faced four tax liens, was sued for not paying rent and was sued for $1.6 million in securities losses, Shain said. His clients passed on Whittier. "Taken together, these three things added up to a red flag," Shain said, explaining that "the report shows Whittier ran out of money or that he's sloppy. Neither inspires confidence."

Fact checking also turned up discrepancies on Bayou founder Samuel Israel's resume when Shain's analysts tracked down the hedge fund manager's former employer, Leon Cooperman, who said he hadn't been head trader and wasn't there for four years.

As investors burned by these blowups wait to recoup money, the trend will be for people to spend a premium on "reputational reviews" that highlight behavior patterns which could become a liability later, investigators said. "People will want to know that the person is a good trader, but they'll also want to hear if the guy heads off to the bar and drinks all night every night," Kroll's Turecek said.

Looking ahead, investors also are likely to press for more clarity on operational matters like who checked the books after Bayou fabricated a firm to certify its returns. "We were able to discover that Bayou's auditor was bullshit," Shain said. This week, Reuters reported that Wood River told potential investors it had retained two firms as independent auditors. But those auditors on Tuesday denied any relationship with the controversial hedge fund.

The original article appears here.

-- MDT

Labels: Bayou Group, John Whittier, Kroll, Milberg, Wood River Capital