In a country where displays of wealth are considered unseemly, Mr. Homm posed for photographs in front of his palatial villa on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, Cuban cigar in hand, and used his millions to shake up one of the country’s most sacred institutions, the Borussia Dortmund soccer team.
So perhaps it should not have been a surprise that Mr. Homm has resurfaced in a blaze of publicity. In a series of media interviews, he has vowed to disprove stock-fixing accusations against him by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. And he has written a book about his years underground that he hopes will dissuade others from following the same path as he.
“I think my story is a really hard-core wake-up call,” Mr. Homm, who continues to live under an assumed name in a country he will not identify, said by telephone Friday.
“I’d like to reach a few souls who are trying to get a second Mercedes and a bigger boat,” he said. “I went to the utmost level of excess and it didn’t work.”
Mr. Homm said he had spent much of the past five years living under an assumed name in Colombia as he tried to find himself, and not be found by dubious characters trying to collect a reward of €1.5 million, or $1.9 million, that had been put on his head. The book is entitled “Kopf Geld Jagd,” which means “Head Money Hunt,” a play on the German term for “bounty hunt.”
“I had a long list of enemies,” Mr. Homm writes in his book. An English edition of the book, entitled “Rogue Financier — Adventures of an Estranged Capitalist,” should be available in electronic form shortly, he said
Just who wants to get Mr. Homm remains a mystery. But presumably the people who put up the reward — since withdrawn — were among the people who lost hundreds of millions investing in the hedge fund that Mr. Homm managed from Majorca, Absolute Capital Management Holdings. The fund’s value plunged in September 2007 shortly after Mr. Homm, his Calvin Klein underwear stuffed with cash, boarded a private turboprop plane on the Spanish island and flew to Colombia, according to the account he gives in the book.
If nothing else, Mr. Homm’s reappearance gives Germany something its financial crisis narrative has lacked so far. German banks were big buyers of subprime mortgage loans and helped cause the euro zone crisis by lending freely to Greece, Spain and other countries that are now struggling to repay their debts. But the country has not produced many financiers who can stand as personal symbols of greed and hubris in the manner of Richard S. Fuld Jr., the former chief of Lehman Brothers.
Enter Homm. In the book, Mr. Homm, a 6-foot-7 inch, 53-year-old who holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in business from Harvard, was both contrite and defiant. He expressed regret for having an underdeveloped sense of scruple, neglecting his children and generally behaving like a jerk. (Mr. Homm used a stronger word to describe himself.)
The main reason for his sudden departure from Europe, he wrote, “was that I needed distance and solitude to find a meaning in my life.”
Mr. Homm, who once shared a €5 million abode on Majorca with a Russian table dancer, said he now prayed daily and planned to devote proceeds from his memoir to schoolchildren in Liberia. He is organizing a charity, Maximum Impact Medicine, whose aim will be to provide inexpensive vaccines to people who do not have access to them now, he said.
To people who may doubt his sincerity, Mr. Homm said: “Watch this space and see in the next year or two if I’m not consistent or not truthful.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/business/global/after-5-years-of-hiding-a-banker-reappears.html?partner=rss&emc=rss