RE: RNS9 Jun 2025 17:05
If its on as pay wall then.....
When one of Europe’s best performing asset managers plunged into crisis this summer, a little-known brokerage took a contrarian view on the illiquid debt securities at the heart of the affair.
H2O Asset Management was suffering what it likened to a bank run, with alarmed clients withdrawing €8bn from its funds. Large financial institutions struggled to see the value in the London-based fund manager’s holdings of hard-to-sell bonds, which backed a ragbag of businesses linked to a racy German financier with a troubled past.
Yet Shard Capital Partners, a small firm based on the 23rd floor of London’s iconic “Walkie Talkie” building, seemed confident these assets were worth a lot more.
When Shard’s name flashed up on trading screens indicating it could buy and sell some of those bonds at much better prices, it would have appeared to some traders that another small broker was prepared to chase business in the rough and tumble world of illiquid debt.
But to those in the orbit of Lars Windhorst, the name was instantly recognisable.
Debilitated by two corporate collapses, a personal bankruptcy and a suspended prison sentence, Mr Windhorst found that many big banks were reluctant to back him as he set out to rebuild his fortune at the beginning of this decade.
Instead, the flamboyant financier relied on a handful of small banks and brokerages in Europe and the Middle East to maintain markets for a host of private securities backing his businesses.
Documents seen by the Financial Times, alongside interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Mr Windhorst’s operations, suggest that Shard — with its wide ranging regulatory licenses — has played a particularly important role in keeping his interests alive.
Mr Windhorst has turned to the brokerage’s founder, James Lewis, to carry out trades in esoteric securities for well over a decade. Even as Shard’s dealings with the German financier dragged the brokerage into high-profile spats — including a hedge fund’s misfired trade that stung a Wall Street bank and a dispute with a Big Four auditor — the relationship has endured.
“If you needed to sell, Lars would tell you to call James,” a fund manager who traded several bonds related to Mr Windhorst told the FT.
One of Shard’s regulatory filings offers a glimpse into just how much of its activity appears to have been linked to Mr Windhorst. The filing indicated that an offshore company controlled by the German financier represented 40 per cent of Shard’s over-the-counter debt trading v
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