David J Black

Sally Rooney really should know that Waterstones’ US parent, private equity fund Elliott Advisors, is part of corporate giant Elliott Investment Management, LP, of West Palm Beach, Florida. As of the first quarter of 2015, Elliott’s portfolio was worth over $8 billion. It originally focussed on distressed securities and national debts, a notable case being its pursuit of near-bankrupt Argentina, and a bid to appropriate an Argentinian naval vessel in Ghana. In June 2024 it was estimated that Elliott had funds under management of around $69.7 billion, with CEO Paul Elliott Singer’s personal wealth being pitched at $6.1 billion by Forbes, up from $2.7 billion in 2018.

Singer has stated that the objective of his book-chain buying frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic is to “leverage the unleverageable, create efficiencies unseen in the book business, and engage in a little world domination, which is about the most thrilling thing a hedge fund guy can do!” It seems that the old Private Eye caricature of sherry-sipping gentlemen publishers Snipcock and Tweed had suddenly become quaintly obsolete. The printed word is now a weapon in a global struggle.

But forget books for now. Paul Elliott Singer’s fossil fuel interests make the alleged indiscretions of Baillie Gifford – now visibly disinvesting in the oil sector, and backing renewables – look positively benign, and the book festival carping of Ms Rooney and her fellow activists downright fatuous. One of Elliott’s larger holdings (around $1.78 billion) is in oil exploration and production giant the Hess Corporation, which was sold to Chevron in 2023. It also has a $1.9 billion ‘position’ in Southwest Airlines, and in 2023 took a $1 billion stake in oil production and distribution company Phillips 66, which owns almost 10,000 service stations in the US and Europe. Green, not so much.

The exploitation of US shale basins also caught Elliott’s attention when the energy sector was lagging. Despite a growing market aversion to fossil fuels, its investments in fracker Validus Energy returned a near $1 billion profit on an $880 million outlay after only 18 months, helped by a boost in West Texas crude prices which peaked at $130 per barrel from a 2020 low of $37.63 after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Little wonder a New Yorker headline styled Singer “The Doomsday Investor.”

Then there’s Israel. Off-shore secrecy laws don’t allow us to discover if Mr Singer, known to some as “a hawkish supporter of right wing Jewish causes”, is, or is not, backing the UK’s oldest Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle. His company has denied the claim but that’s a side issue. More liberal Jewish views, as expressed in The US newspaper Forward, for example, can be critical. “During the debate over the Iranian nuclear deal, Singer used his fortune to support opponents of the agreement. He even bankrolled an anti-deal Christian group.” How very ecumenical!

Mr Singer’s involvement in Israel is emphatically hands on. In 2013, for example, he invested $20 million in a Tel Aviv-based tech enterprise Startup Nation Central (SNC). He followed this in 2021 with the funding of an economic and research institute to promote Israeli technology and its “innovation ecosystem” around the world. Quite how this will be helping to Make America Great Again is hard to fathom, given the outsourcing implications which led to Google staff protests against lay-offs in New York and California after the company entered into a £1.2 billion ‘Project Nimbus’ deal with the Israeli government and defence sector, prompting the anti-extremist Jewish Voice for Peace to launch a “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign.

For corporate risk assessors, however, a brutal and interminable war is not such an attractive environment for inward investment. Not surprisingly, for reasons both moral and fiduciary, foreign investors have been cooling on Singer’s Tel-Aviv project, despite attempts to maintain an upbeat tone. To quote an SNC press release of July 2024:

An SNC report some months later by CEO Avi Hasson, One Year of Israeli Innovation in War, was cautiously optimistic about the tech sector’s economic performance, if not so much about the horrors of Gaza and the West Bank. The military-industrial importance of this was not lost on Benjamin Netanyahu, who strongly supports the drive to have Israeli intelligence units merged with tech companies involved in high-level foreign partnerships. He made no secret of this policy, stating during a 2018 Fox News interview: “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”

At the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv Netanyahu declared that Israel’s position as one of the worlds top five cyber powers “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and required allowing “graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners”.

It is unlikely, of course, that Ms Rooney and other Baillie Gifford bashing scribes who set out their wares in Waterstones have joined the dots here. Ms Rooney poses as “one of the literary world’s most vocal and eloquent advocates for Palestinian rights, as well as a trenchant critic of Israeli brutality and US complicity in the war on Gaza”. (Literary Hub). Shortly before the Taoiseach’s St Patrick’s Day visit to the White House she lambasted the Irish government in The Irish Times for:

Ms Rooney, for the very best of reasons no doubt, expostulates with an anger which I imagine many decent people share, yet could she herself not be accused of “preserving a cosy relationship with those supplying the bombs”, given her links with Paul Elliot Singer’s all powerful bookshop chain? She was also amongst those who attacked Baillie Gifford for its alleged links to Israel, and has instructed that her books should not be translated into Hebrew.

Yet is she really so secure on her moral high ground? After all, she is something of a profit centre for a hard-line neo-conservative vulture capitalist and loyal supporter of Netanyahu and his far right Likud Party, currently in the grip of ultra-extremist coalition partners such as his finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-givr.

It isn’t as if Sally Rooney – whose Normal People was named Waterstones ‘Book of the Year’ in 2018 – hasn’t been called out over her link with Elliott. The London-based Jewish journalist Nicole Lampert posted the following on X on 4th November 2024, for example:

Not everything in life goes to plan, of course. Though Intermezzo was The Standard’s top tip for the 2024 Waterstones Book of the Year award, it was the one mentioned last on their shortlist of 15 (Butter by Asako Yuzuki) which scooped the prize. Could it be that Rooneymania is on the wane?

At least this award oversight won’t impact on Sally Rooney’s bank balance. Unlike the £50,000 which comes with the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, and despite the ever-increasing super-wealth of the Elliott conglomerate, the Waterstones winners receive not a brass sou for their efforts! Elliotts would seem to have better things to do with its money, like investing in the fossil fuel industry and supporting Donald Trump.
 
Part 4 will be more of the same – but worse!