by DW News Staff at DW
Rishi Sunak, the former UK finance minister, is set to be the country’s next prime minister after his only rival withdrew from the Conservative Party leadership race on Monday.
The 42-year-old politician will be Britain’s youngest prime minister in more than a century, the country’s first nonwhite leader and the first Hindu to take the job.
In a short statement on Monday, Sunak paid tribute to outgoing Prime Minister Liz Truss, saying she had dealt with “exceptionally difficult circumstances.”
He said he wanted to give back to country he “owed so much to.”
“There is no doubt we face a profound economic challenge,” he said. He added that the country needed “stability and unity”, and pledged to would bring his party and the country together.
Sunak promised to serve with “integrity and humility.”
Sunak rises after Truss falls…
T-Room here: Pam and Russ Martens over at Wall Street on Parade has more background on Mr Sunak that appeared to vanish from his LinkedIn profile –
The newly installed U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, (the third PM in seven weeks) has scrubbed his Goldman Sachs and hedge fund career from his LinkedIn profile and from his official government bio. But, unfortunately for Sunak, those careers have been assiduously chronicled in countless newspaper articles for more than a decade – and not in a good way.
Sunak worked as a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2001 to 2004, where part of his research involved railways. He left Goldman to obtain his MBA at Stanford University, following which he joined TCI hedge fund in 2006 as a partner and worked there until 2009, when he left to co-found the hedge fund, Theleme Partners with Patrick Degorce. Sunak worked at Theleme Partners until 2014, when he moved into conservative politics in the U.K. That’s a total of 13 years involvement in financial markets that Sunak wants to obliterate from his work history.
Those 13 years in finance include a number of controversial events. Chief among them was Sunak’s direct involvement in activism against the board of the U.S. rail freight operator, CSX. The TCI hedge fund had secretly acquired a large stake in CSX along with another hedge fund, 3G Capital Partners, through the purchase of shares as well as total return equity swaps, a form of opaque derivatives that can be used to disguise a large share stake. (That same type of derivative was used by Archegos Capital Management last year to disguise its giant stake in ViacomCBS and other companies, blow itself up, and leave mega global banks nursing margin loan losses of more than $10 billion.)
CSX was highly displeased with the hedge funds’ sneaky activism and…
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