A few days after Anthony Scaramucci lined up a top job in Donald Trump’s White House, he struck a multimillion-dollar deal to exit his investment firm, selling part of his interest to a little-known company, RON Transatlantic EG.
Scaramucci, the organizer of a popular hedge fund conference, said Friday in an interview that he doesn’t know the identity of RON’s investors and relied, as is customary, on RON’s managers to vet them. A RON spokesman declined to name the investors, and their identities haven’t been disclosed to Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital, according to a representative of the firm.
Scaramucci is getting a head-turning price compared with similar transactions, analysts say. RON teamed up with another buyer, a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co., to buy most of SkyBridge in a deal that values the asset manager at $180 million or more depending on performance, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss terms. Scaramucci said the price is fair and that he turned down higher offers.
Securities disclosures and corporate reports identify the man behind at least some of RON’s holdings: Danilo Diazgranados Manglano, a 52-year-old Venezuelan-born banker known for close ties to the administration of that country’s late president, Hugo Chavez. As of last year, Diazgranados owned as much as 10 percent of SkyBridge through a RON investment vehicle formed in the English Channel island of Jersey, one securities filing shows.
Diazgranados isn’t part of the current buyer group and already has shed his stake in SkyBridge, his lawyer, Gregory Craig, said in an interview. He declined to comment further on the transaction.
Ethics Disclosures
Richard Painter, who served as an ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush, said a transaction like the one Scaramucci is pursuing calls for more public disclosure and a close look by the White House.
“Here, we’ve got foreign money, and we don’t even know who it is,” said Painter, now a professor at the University of Minnesota.
Scaramucci has filed all of the ethics disclosures required for his White House role and has agreed to recuse himself from any matter that pertains to his SkyBridge interest, said Elliot Berke, a lawyer for Scaramucci.
“They bought SkyBridge in spite of, not because of, my affiliation with the administration, because they both recognize that I would personally recuse myself from any and all activities in terms of my relationship with the administration,” Scaramucci said.