Asma al-Assad - a Modern Marie Antoinette?

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أسماء الأسد: "ماري إنطوانيت" سوريا؟ ‎

When I first started to investigate I had no clue about how hard it would be to find facts that are trustworthy or information that would help to nail my thoughts down. The person I wanted to hunt down this time was Asma Al-Assad, the first Lady of Syria.

My interest in Arabic countries is based on the fact that I started to learn Arabic recently. I had the ongoing rebellion in Syria in mind and the billions of dollars that Mubarak owned in my memory when I read that Asma Al-Assad grew up in London and studied finance. Before she married she worked for Deutsche Bank then for the investment firm JP Morgan.

Why would an ambitious and smart woman like her go back to her slow moving country to marry a future dictator? – I could not find an answer to this question, but nobody can tell me that she did it because of love. 

What I did find is some more information about her life and her interest in finance:

She attended King’s College University of London and graduated in 1996 with first class honors degree in Computer Science.

In 1997, she started to work at Deutsche Bank in London as an analyst in the Hedge Fund Management section of Sales and Trading. She covered clients in the Far East and Europe.

In 1998, she joined the investment banking division of JP Morgan, London. She specialized in Mergers and Acquisitions for Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies. During the three years she spent at JP Morgan, she was sent to their Paris office for 9 months and to the New York office for 18 months, where she advised and executed four large merger transactions for both European and American clients.

After leaving JP Morgan in November 2000, she returned to Syria and married Bashar Al-Assad in December 2000.

Since then you would hear that she set up various charity organizations and that she held different meetings with several First Ladies from all over the world. You would have seen some pictures of her three sons and of her kind husband presenting her with flowers. She represented the perfect image of a kind-hearted caring mother for the state.

Vouge

In February 2011 the lifestyle magazine Vogue published an article about Asma and her husband. The author had the exclusive opportunity to interview both Bashar and Asma before the revolution. Sadly, Vogue's article has been almost entirely scrubbed from the internet. Of course a Bounty Hunter like me has the contacts and resources to find the last copy available on the internet. 

Here are three extracts from the article:

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East … It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men … Muslim veil are forbidden in universities … a place without bombings … and kidnappings.

Asma: “What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project." She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch...

Asma: “As a banker, you have to be so focused on the job at hand that you lose the experience of the world around you.”

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Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun 

A more Up-to-Date article on El-Shaab, an Arabic website, describes Asma al-Assad as the "Marie Antoinette" of the Syrian State. (أسماء الأسد: "ماري إنطوانيت" سوريا؟) It claims that Asma is just the cold lioness that fights for the "pope of the tyrants" and that she makes sure that she does what is necessary to support him.

As all further sources let me down and my Syrian friends are too scared to say out loud what is in their heads, I can only speculate. I think that Asma’s sense for good and bad is distracted by her will to be successful. There are several hints about her important role in the financial affairs of the family al-Assad which would equal the affairs of the state, but nobody could confirm. 

To me Asma is more than just a First Lady. Why would she be satisfied with Charity Organizations and her job as a mother when she has an excellent education and a very competitive personality? There has to be another clue… and as I said in my previous entry, it is just a matter of time till I find it.

Florian Homm - the Target

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Who is Homm?

Homm is a larger-than-life version of the hedge fund archetype and not just because he is 6ft 6in (over 2 metres). A specialist in the world of small companies, an expert in German business and a serial entrepreneur. He started his first investment company at 18, has worked at Merrill Lynch, Fidelity and Julius Baer, and has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics, cum laude. His skill was in picking smaller companies, often taking big stakes in names such as Borussia Dortmund, the German football club. 

He raked in millions with short sales and gilding falling market prices. He invented losses, spread rumors and negative breakdowns. The stock market regulator BaFin intervened, reprimanded and imposed a fine. Homm complained "Incompetent Regulators," and smiled because of the penalty. The SEC has it in for Homm since 2005. When Homm’s Absolute Capital Management (ACM on Bloomberg) was taken private in April 2009, the assets had decreased from $ 3 billion to $ 2.3 million. This creates enemies. In the same year Homm disappeared.

F1 Online 

Where is Homm?

The world is split into two shades. Countries in which Florian Homm has been sighted since his disappearance are dark. Countries which are in the extradition treaty are light. A legend shows the number of clues per country. Striking dark is South America: Panama, Venezuela and Brazil. 

This map is pinned to a wall in my office. I am a private investigator. Some might say I am a bounty hunter. Homm's "enemies" are my customers. They feel betrayed and want revenge. And of course they want their money back. It is my goal is to recover my client’s money before the police can lock Homm up in jail for at least ten years. I think that it is only a matter of time untill target Homm is caught. The only question is who catches him first, me or the police. 

Homm's case is not an exception. Bounty hunters like me are in great demand. We act in a legal twilight zone and try to be discreet. Five years ago I had to stop investigating for some time because there was a picture of me in a newspaper. I changed my face since then. Now I am back on track of financial delinquents like Homm. These people, or targets as I like to call them, can not be handled like an average criminal. These people are greatly intelligent and streetwise. What makes it even harder to catch them is their money. They simply buy their way out of precarious situations.