Anonymous groups that bet against Quindell and Blinkx unmasked

In April this year, investors bombarded the UK stock market regulator with hundreds of requests for the identity of a previously unheard of company, called Roble SL.

They wanted to know who was behind the little-known group because it had built up a sizeable short position in Quindell, a London-listed company that had just suffered a sharp fall in its share price, after a research outfit named Gotham City questioned its accounting.

Roble, which had declared its bet against Quindell two months before Gotham City published its research report, reaped millions of pounds in paper profits as £1bn was wiped off the Aim-quoted company's market capitalisation.

But the UK Financial Conduct Authority insisted that it was bound by confidentiality rules. So curious investors then turned their enquiries to Spain because the SL in Roble's name resembled the designation of a company incorporated in that country. However, they found no trace of Roble in Spain, or anywhere else.

Now, the Financial Times can reveal that Roble is one of a clutch of shell companies based in the Cayman Islands created by Tiger Global, one of the world's largest but lowest profile hedge funds. Tiger Global used a series of these structures to bet against at least a dozen European companies, including Quindell.

The tactic made the group, which has $15bn under management including $6.5bn in its hedge fund, one the most successful short sellers on the continent - up 20 per cent at one point this year, while rivals floundered.

It worked so well that the companies Tiger Global targeted, and their shareholders, had no idea who was behind the trades. Even some national regulators were completely in the dark about the ultimate owner of short positions in their jurisdictions.

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At that time, some politicians were pushing for a ban on short selling because they were angered that some investors were profiting as banks teetered on the brink of collapse. But market participants argued that short selling helps determine the true worth of a company and can help the market identify troubled companies.

Since 2012, investors have been required to inform national regulators whenever they take a net short position greater than 0.2 per cent of a company's shares and the regulator then makes the disclosure public if total position is bigger than 0.5 per cent. But the disclosure forms do not ask who the ultimate owner of the short position is.

Tiger Global, which is has become one of the world's best performing hedge funds, is no stranger to secrecy. It has long been closed to new money and is so discreet that it does not even reveal its short positions in its written updates to its investors. A spokeswoman for the fund declined to comment for this article.

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To conduct its European activities, the group set up a series of companies registered in the Cayman Islands with names that included suffixes making them sound like European company incorporations, such as the German "GmBH", or Dutch "NV".

They then set up and disclosed a series of short positions held by these Cayman Island entities, including some in companies that have since seen their share prices fall dramatically.

In December 2013, for example, an entity named Blau GmBH declared a short position in Blinkx, a small UK-listed internet company, with a share price that had surged by more than 200 per cent that year.

In late January, Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard business professor, published a blog questioning the way Blinkx reported its web traffic numbers - critical statistics for a company reliant on advertising. Shares in Blinkx tumbled, netting millions of pounds in paper profits for Tiger Global.

There is no evidence that Tiger Global had contact with the authors of the critical research on Blinkx or Quindell before it was published.

At another point in 2013, a different Tiger Global entity, Fest NV, built up a short position in Nokia, the Finnish telecoms company, worth over $200m - one of the largest single short bets in Europe by size at the time.

Other Tiger Global targets, traded via the apparently Italian Fresco SRL, included the British retailer HMV before its bankruptcy and Hibu, the one-time publisher of the UK Yellow Pages, which later entered administration.

Rival hedge funds, which compete to borrow shares in companies that they can then sell, were left befuddled by what appeared to be some of the smartest and successful short sellers in Europe.

"We couldn't understand how what looked like small unknown funds kept building up such large positions," says one fund manager. "They were often there first and had the stock borrow locked up before others had a chance."

Tiger Global's use of shell companies on disclosure forms was unusual but entirely legal. Most hedge funds use their own names when declaring short positions but the official forms only require investors to declare the name of the entity that has opened the trade.

On its forms, which all national regulators could see, Tiger Global listed the name of the relevant Cayman entity, a post office box address in the islands and its London-based lawyers Simmons & Simmons.

When some national regulators contacted the law firm and asked for the ultimate owner of the short positions, Tiger Global provided the information. But others never asked.

The rise of one of Robertson's 'tiger cubs'

Who is Tiger Global? Tiger Global is one of the largest and most successful of the so-called "Tiger Cub" hedge funds, named because of their ties to Tiger Management one of the largest fund of the 1990s run by the famed investor Julian Robertson.

Mr Robertson, a former US navy officer, became one of the most revered stock pickers on Wall Street as he built his hedge fund Tiger Management through the 1980s and 1990s into a $20bn investment group.

Mr Robertson, pictured, wound down Tiger Management just before the dotcom bubble burst after he was wounded by a series of mistimed currency bets and an unwillingness to touch what he believed were dangerously overvalued tech stocks.

In its place, Mr Robertson decided to seed many of the young employees he had trained up at Tiger to launch their own hedge funds, birthing the concept of the "Tiger Cubs", funds that have become some of the largest and most successful in the world.

Of all the Tiger Cub funds, Tiger Global, which was launched by Charles "Chase" Coleman, has stood out as one of the most successful and enigmatic among a competitive field including Andreas Halvorsen's Viking, Stephen Mandel's Lone Pine and Philippe Laffont's Coatue.

Mr Coleman, who was a friend of Mr Robertson's son when growing up, launched Tiger Global in 2001 with a small amount of seed money from his mentor when he was just 25 years old.

Mr Coleman, who co-manages Tiger Global's equity funds with Feroz Dewan, has generated some of the best returns of any large long-short equity fund in the world since inception, with the hedge fund surging by more than 40 per cent in 2011 and gained more than 20 per cent this year until recent stock market volatility erased some of those gains, people familiar with the fund said.

The fund has since grown into managing a total of $15bn of assets, with $6.5bn in a hedge fund and the rest used for venture capital and private equity investments.

While the Mr Coleman is known for being highly discreet about his investments Tiger Global has attracted attention for its highly successful pre-IPO investments in tech companies such as Facebook and Zynga.

Due to its success, and its enigmatic appearance, Tiger Global has also become very difficult for investors to gain access to, with the hedge fund part of the business having been closed for several years to new money.

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