My story has been, from the beginning, entrepreneurship, hard work, risk-taking, and the relationships you build through business. This is a story of superyachts, spies, and scandal. This is a story about the lives of two consummate risk-takers

colliding, and through their collaboration, destroying hundreds of millions of investors' money. Bruno Crastes, one of the finest fund managers of his generation. Lars Windhorst, a racy financier with nine lives.

My estimated exposure is beyond 1.5 million euros. Real people, people's pensions, people's investments. Some of the underlying transactions could qualify as money laundering. I made mistakes, and I do work hard to rectify the mistakes I made

and help people who have suffered because of my mistakes and lost money, too. The big question for me is: where has the money gone? At the heart of this story, you have H2O Asset Management and its founder, Bruno Crastes,

one of the biggest stars of European investment, coming under the thrall of Lars Windhorst, a charismatic financier with a criminal past. My name is Lars Windhorst. I'm the founder and CEO of Tennor Group,

which is a private equity investment holding company. Why did you agree to do the interview? It's just my own gut feeling. I mean, how bad can it be? It's much better than hiding and not showing up.

The impression people might have is that I am driven by money, that I'm flamboyant. The reality is the opposite. Relationships motivate me more than money. My shortcoming has been that I have sometimes cared too little about money.

My name's Robert Smith. I'm the corporate finance editor at the FT. I'm Cynthia O'Murchu. I'm an investigative reporter. I've been following Lars Windhorst for the past decade, and Bruno Crastes and H2O.

I first started looking at Lars in 2017, and we realized that H2O was a really big part of the story very shortly afterwards. Lars Windhorst is one of the most enigmatic figures in European finance.

He's got friends in high places - Michael Douglas, the Hollywood actor, to Wladimir Klitschko, the heavyweight boxing champion. Since an early age, I had the dream to build a business empire. My first proper business was started when I was 14 years old

in 1991. By accident, into the PC business, I got a phone call from my main supplier, a Chinese businessman. I met the guy. "I'm Lars Windhorst. We have an appointment." "What? You? You are 12.

You are not 16." About a month later, he said: "Look, everyone thinks it's crazy, but there's something about you." The Chinese friend and business partner then moved into the guest room of my parents' home, and we started.

He went on a business trip with Chancellor Kohl, who was one of the most powerful politicians in Germany. This was not long after the Berlin Wall had fallen. Germany had this kind of yearning for this economic renaissance, and here,

burst onto the scene, this teenager. During that trip, we got closer, me and the chancellor, and became friendly. He invited me into a kind of informal economic advisory council of the government. I joined him on many different state visits

to Asia, to America. He was in all the media. It was a big circus around this young kid. Lars was planning to build the tallest skyscraper in Vietnam, Windhorst Tower. He got dubbed the 'German Bill Gates.'

He was the wunderkind of German business. Quite soon into his business career, questions started to emerge. Allegations of financial impropriety, business partners suing him. He had a string of lawsuits in his 20s.

It became a need to correspond to this amazing image. The beginning of the end, or the beginning of the first big failure, because it was too much, too quick, too fast, led to me becoming a bit careless.

In the 2000s, Lars had a string of corporate bankruptcies. He had a personal bankruptcy. He had criminal charges. I had to ask my mother, grandmother, sister, father, a Chinese group, to give me some money because I could not

access any cash. A painful period for me, also for my parents. They accused me of delayed bankruptcy filing, fraud, and breach of trust. The legal advice was this may take 10 years.

I decided at that time in 2009 to do a plea bargain where I had to pay a fine and accept a suspended sentence, and I had a criminal record from then. It got deleted after 10 years. And he avoided going to prison. But he had to stand up in court and admit that he misappropriated company funds.

I did not procure properly signed board resolutions. To admit this is a lesser problem for me than to have a fraud charge. I did not have a hidden bank account where I misappropriated funds. Some people might have been destroyed

by all of this - not him. Lars is a great corporate survivor, but he's also a literal survivor. He survived a plane crash. The plane needed to do a fuel stop on the way, which was Almaty, Kazakhstan, and it was winter.

Immediately, when it was in the air, it started to shake and then almost flipped 90 degrees to the right. The plane broke apart and the back part exploded. The front part, where I was in, separated. One pilot, sadly, died.

The other one had more severe injuries than me. The German ambassador, when I woke up, was there. A Kazakh nurse came in and started to, with scissors, cut my jeans. I said: "Stop. I have only one pair of jeans with me."

Don't destroy my jeans. I need to go to Hong Kong." And then the ambassador said: "Listen, shall I bring a mirror? You will not go anywhere." A week or so later, he announces that he's become one of the biggest shareholders in Air Berlin.

The deal from the hospital bed. After the criminal conviction, his reputation in Germany is pretty much in the dirt. So what does he do? He sets up in London. Mayfair is the place where Russian oligarchs and billionaire sheikhs strike deals.

The most fascinating and intellectually interesting and challenging business, which is, kind of, in my view, the Champions League of business, is finance. That is the lubricant, the fuel which keeps the whole world economy going. He basically starts brokering investments for people.

This is a world of low interest rates, quantitative easing. It's quite hard for people to make a buck, and he turns a lot of heads. His office in Mayfair is on Savile Row, and the office is incredible.

The penthouse floor, he totally remodels the place. It becomes all black marble, modern art, floor-to-ceiling wine fridge. A lot of people are bamboozled by the glitz. OK, this guy has some skeletons in his closet.

But as the thousand-pound wine is tinkling into their glass, all those concerns seem to melt away. It has been useful to have an office in London's Mayfair the last 10 years to receive and meet clients and investors.

from all over the world. It is beneficial for a banker who lends money to a client to have a relationship and to know firsthand what's going on, what is he thinking, how is he feeling? Does he look good? Does he look confident?

Does he look scared? I think all of these soft factors do matter, even in the age of Zoom calls and emails. Well, money begets money. A billionaire is more likely to talk to someone who he thinks is also a billionaire.

So he had this amazing yacht called 'The Global.' It's like 74 meters. It had space for 12 guests. It got sold a while ago, but when I had a yacht I did use it, again, for meeting people,

for relationships. He was bringing Bruno Crastes onto the yacht, the family of Bruno Crastes. Bruno Crastes is a suave silver fox. He's got this winning smile and this deep Mediterranean tan. Here you have a guy who says, 'I'm

going to take a lot of risks, but I'm going to make you rich.' So Bruno sets up H2O Asset Management, his own firm, in 2010. He took big risks. He used a lot of leverage. He took big bets.

He's someone who held his nerve when things got really tough. That trait has brought him riches, to not go where the crowd goes and the ability to hold steadfast. It served him really well in the time of the financial crisis.

against all odds. They got seed investment from Natixis and they took off. His investment philosophy is that risk management and regulation make you cut your positions when they go against you. He says that's when you should hold your nerve.

Ordinary savers can put their money in H2O. I'm Lionel Paillet. I'm French. The money I invested into H2O funds came from savings, and it's essentially family money. When I looked at H2O, I didn't know that company.

The performance that was discussed by H2O, from my advisors, was exceptional, but also de-risked by the names on the tickets. When you look at Natixis, you look at KPMG, CACEIS,

you're like, wow, you feel confident. Vincent Chailley is the chief investment officer of H2O. Our strategic positions are doing really well. He's essentially like Bruno's business partner. Vincent was the one that first established this relationship

with Lars. Some people even said Vincent was besotted with Lars. In 2015, H2O started entering into transactions with Lars Windhorst and related companies. Right from the start, it appeared to go wrong.

H2O is called H2O Asset Management because it's supposed to invest in liquid and transparent financial products. What Lars is selling are illiquid investments, incredibly hard to sell and incredibly opaque as well.

There are some very complicated transactions. So H2O is often doing something called repo. These were repurchase agreements where Windhorst companies would sell H2O a bond. That bond would then get repurchased by a Windhorst company.

It would go on and on and on, happening multiple times - buy, sell, buy, sell, buy, sell. Bonds were not just moving up, down towards H2O and down to Windhorst companies and back.

They were also moving sideways from one Windhorst ladder company to another. So you'd have the holding company of Lars buying bonds related to a lingerie company, for example, from a company that was set to back an oil venture.

It's pretty strange. It's a bit like the shell game. You have to follow where all this money is and you can't. Back then, we did several transactions which looked to us not too exotic, intra-group activity

within companies we controlled. In retrospect, you can look at it and say, was that the smartest thing to do? There was liquidity in our bonds, and there was a wider audience of investors trading those bonds. The things we did were not out of the ordinary.

Some of these companies, their funding, it comes out later in court that they're making loans to Lars himself. There's a sort of intermingling of Lars's personal finances and the corporate finances. And you have to ask, who's paying for the private jet?

Who's paying for the superyacht? Who's paying for the Savile Row office? Who's paying for the wine? I do not believe that there has been mingling between private and business because everything we have done, I have done.

I spent my time on... the last few years has been predominantly business. The real big turning point came in 2017. They started pouring money into Lars Windhorst related companies. Chailley himself is worried about this.

He sends an email to Bruno saying Lars is leveraging himself on our balance sheet, borrowing too much money from us. And he says, we have to do something. Lars, in his communications to H2O, he's pretty upfront.

There are emails he sends to Bruno where he says we need to clean the balance sheets of various companies. And he essentially asks H2O, can you buy some of these bonds to take them off the balance sheet before an auditor or bank looks at them?

If someone asks you to help them clean their laundry, that's probably OK. But someone asking you to help clean their balance sheet should set off a few alarm bells. At the start, it seems like Bruno might be a bit skeptical about Lars.

It'd take five minutes of looking on the internet to see if there might be some red flags. He seems to get seduced by Lars. Bruno wrote to Lars to thank him for a week-long New Year's trip on the yacht and said it was a family relationship.

Lars Windhorst likewise replies, saying it's also, for me, extended family. And this is when the personal and professional lives of Lars Windhorst and Bruno Crastes really start to intertwine.

It was like Bruno and Vincent were brothers. And then Lars turns up, charismatic, charming, also very much into risk-taking. Bruno's always insisted that he thought there was great upside. By betting this money, he could make

even more for his investors. They may have believed there was value in this, or there's something else going on, something darker. I'm Dominique Stucki, a partner in Paris. I've been working on the H2O case for five years now.

Some of the underlying transactions made by Tennor with the funding of H2O could qualify as money laundering. One of the intriguing subplots in this is the link between Lars Windhorst and a bank in Switzerland called Falcon Private Bank

and its former chairman, an Emirati businessman called Khadem al-Qubaisi. Falcon Bank and al-Qubaisi were implicated in the 1MDB scandal. This is the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.

Billions of dollars were siphoned off by high-level Malaysian officials and their associates and then laundered all over the world. Some of that money went through Falcon Bank. In 2016, Swiss and Singaporean regulators

found that Falcon Bank had breached money laundering regulations on some of these trades. KPMG did an internal investigation into Falcon and found that al-Qubaisi had a fund at the bank which carried out 100 transactions linked to Lars Windhorst.

KPMG was concerned that some of them didn't make any economic sense, and that some were used to help Windhorst manipulate prices and benefit him. We can see from emails between Lars and H2O that Lars suggested

a number of transactions with Falcon Bank, in some cases even after serious questions were raised about Falcon and 1MDB. One of the early trades H2O did with Lars involved Falcon. H2O had to chase Lars and Falcon for weeks to settle the trade.

It really was a warning sign for trading problems to come. One in 2016 was very convoluted. So Lars asks H2O to do a quick and urgent trade, and it involves bonds and cash moving from one party

to the other in a daisy chain. When Vincent asks why Falcon is selling the bond, Lars explains that the point of the daisy chain is to get money to a third party altogether. Two banks refused to clear the trade on compliance grounds,

leaving them to look for someone else to step in. We asked H2O about these trades, but they didn't specifically address them. Twelve years ago, thirteen years ago, Falcon Private Bank, as a bank, decided to invest into various opportunities we brought to them.

Securities, stocks, and bonds, not even directly from us, but through the issuing bank who issued those securities. There has been a bank-to-bank transaction like it is usually done in the financial markets. And what the bank then does with the securities they have bought

on their own book is solely a decision and a discretion of the bank, and nothing where we can be or have been involved with. We had no direct business relationship with Khadem al-Qubaisi. I cannot imagine, given the nature of how transactions were

executed and booked, that a money laundering risk could be something which would face us or them. Lars has had so many near-death experiences in a corporate sense, and we keep hearing, "Oh, well, he got out of this scrape because H2O gave him some money."

What evidence is there for this? I spent quite a bit of time pulling together all the amounts, all the different companies that we knew were connected to Lars Windhorst. We were thinking, you know, maybe this will spit out

a few hundred million. If it gets to half a billion, that'd be great. That's a nice, sexy round number. And we got to over 1.4 billion. We can hardly believe it. One of the most revered fund managers in Europe

has bet over a billion euros with a guy with a criminal conviction behind it all. Days before we publish our investigation, Vincent sends an email talking about all the problems with this exposure related to Lars. And he says, "Confidence takes a long time to build,

but it can vanish quickly. At this moment, he doesn't
realize that confidence is about to vanish very quickly in H2O. It's like a bomb going off. The stock price of H2O's parent
company, the French bank Natixis

crashes. There are questions raised about
the liquidity of H2O's funds. Investors got really spooked
and started yanking their money out, around eight
billion euros in eight days. And in the middle of this,
Bruno tries to halt

this crisis of confidence. If he talks directly
to investors, he can stop the stampede. And there are a couple of
video addresses he does. There were a number of investors
who originally pulled money out. There were other investors
who were convinced.

Bruno, as we understand,
really thought this was going to
blow over in no time. The second video
was less confident. "We never gated, and
we will never gate. Volatile periods have always
been a great opportunity."

"We will never gate the funds." He will never stop
investors from being able to withdraw their money. It's a sort of magic
spell that stops the stampede. Those messages gave
me zero confidence. Natixis was trying
to get out of H2O.

You've got, like, very
tangible information out there. I understand you're trying
to calm everybody down, but there is bad news. Why hide it? Bruno's a risk-taker. He's ramped up all these
leveraged positions

and he runs into the COVID crash. H2O's funds crash. They crash as much as 50 percent. And that's really problematic because Bruno has to stay within regulated caps on how much illiquid exposure they have.

And as the liquid investments crash in value, the illiquid investments become a bigger proportion of the funds, and you start to breach some of these thresholds. Again, it's this holding the nerve, going against the grain

that everybody else does, which is kind of the tagline of H2O. H2O's approach is, and has always been, to go where others don't. Bruno promised investors that he'd never gate the funds.

Regulators effectively do that for him. And a whole number of funds were frozen. Essentially, the investors could not take their money out anymore. What H2O does is carve out these Windhorst bonds.

It creates a sort of wall around this toxic exposure, and it walls off 1.6 billion euros of investors' money and says, "We can't give you this back until we get the money back from Lars." I looked at my bank statements.

Every month you just see the valuation of that asset diminishing and diminishing like snow under the sun. It's dark. My opinion about them is really... is very poor, to say the least. According to the investors who are suing H2O,

They've calculated that H2O was exposed by between 2.3 and 2.7 billion euros to Lars Windhorst related companies. H2O disputes that figure. This document, which is minutes by the H2O Executive

Committee, you have this sentence at the beginning of the document that states: "Currently, H2O Funds' exposure to the Tennor Group, nine entities, amounts to 2.7 billion euros." The French regulator holds an enforcement hearing.

H2O gets handed down the biggest fine for an asset manager ever in French history, 75 million euros. He's had to pay a massive settlement to avoid a fine in the UK. Bruno Crastes was fined 15 million.

But more seriously, they ban him from fund management. Bruno isn't allowed to run funds for half a decade. This is the most serious sanction against a fund manager in France, and it's handed down to someone who

was once one of its biggest stars. It's an incredible fall from grace. Vincent Chailley fined 3 million, a lesser fine because he had raised the alarm. But they continued on. Vincent Chailley remains as chief investment officer.

Bruno was re-titled Group Corporate and Strategy Director. It's easy to point at H2O, but that's not the entire story. We're not only suing H2O, we're also suing Natixis Investment Managers, KPMG, and CACEIS Bank.

Natixis is responsible for supervising the management of its affiliates. Relating to internal control and money laundering control, CACEIS banks should have checked whether all the assets in the funds were duly invested in liquid securities.

KPMG, the auditor of the funds, also has an oversight responsibility. At the heart of this, there's ordinary savers' money. Billions that were placed with what seemed like a reputable investment firm have sort of gone up in smoke.

The safety valves that are built into the financial system failed to operate properly. Internally, in H2O, why did these safety valves not work? In the case of the FCA, H2O basically tried to cover things up.

It submitted false documents to the regulator. It created board minutes for meetings that didn't happen. When they asked them, "Oh, have you had any sort of personal trips with Lars?", they didn't really tell them anything.

Bruno had flown around the world and taken these superyacht trips. When it comes to the FCA, rather than fining them more, they were settling with them to get H2O to pay back investors. The decision by the FCA states that €250 million would be

dedicated to all investors, whether they decide to sue or not. H2O has decided to discriminate against those who want to get their money back. They can either take a relatively small amount of money, this €250 million, divided amongst all these investors,

and it's a fraction of what they believe that they're owed, and in return, not sue any of the other parties that, in the eyes of the investors, should have had a responsibility for preventing this from happening. Or they can wait, and H2O has indicated that they

might have to wait six years. You need to trust asset managers and the financial markets. As a private investor, I think this really goes against it. It will bring a lot of distrust to the system. And time has passed, so time is not making the story better.

It smells worse. Right amidst the whole scandal, Lars Windhorst announced he was going to buy Hertha Berlin Football Club. He was supposed to have paid a down payment, and he turned to H2O to give them the liquidity and the money

to pay. One person he didn't get on with was the president of the club, called Werner Gegenbauer. Well, the problem is, the president's elected by the members. So Lars can't just fire the guy.

Lars Windhorst and H2O: scandal, spies and the superyacht | FT Film

Interested in unbiased global news and want to make sense of a changing world? The Financial Times YouTube channel showcases the best of our visual journalism, going beyond the headlines to help you navigate the world’s new agenda. Our stories will inform and inspire you to lead the way in business and beyond, to rethink existing political and economic models and follow crucial trends. Join us and gain deeper insight into the news. 

Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2019. FT and 'Financial Times' are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd. Please do not copy or redistribute FT videos otherwise than in accordance with YouTube's Terms of Service. If you wish to purchase rights to syndicate FT videos, please contact syndication@ft.com.



Financial Times

위험을 감수하는 두 사람, 브루노 크라스테스와 라스 윈드호스트의 협업으로 투자자들에게 막대한 금전적 손실을 가져온 이야기를 소개합니다.

기업가 정신, 위험 감수, 슈퍼요트와 스파이가 연루된 스캔들에 대해 집중 조명합니다.

성공한 펀드 매니저 브루노 크라스테스와 수상한 과거를 가진 금융가 라스 윈드호스트를 소개합니다.

투자자에게 미치는 영향, 자금 세탁의 가능성, 자신의 실수를 바로잡으려는 윈드호스트의 시도를 강조합니다.

H2O 자산 관리와 라스 윈드호스트의 초기 경력에 대한 배경.

H2O의 창립자 브루노 크라스테스와 라스 윈드호스트와의 인연에 대해 자세히 알아보세요.

돈보다 관계를 중시하는 윈드호스트의 동기와 대중적 인물을 살펴봅니다.

독일에서 10대 기업가로서 두각을 나타낸 윈드호스트의 초기 비즈니스 벤처와 성장 과정을 다룹니다.

윈드호스트에 대한 재정적 부적절 혐의와 소송의 출현에 대해 논의합니다.

윈드호스트의 재정적, 법적 문제와 그의 회복력, 그리고 런던의 금융계로 진출하기까지.

윈드호스트의 파산, 형사 고발, 양형 협상에 대해 이야기합니다.

비행기 추락 사고에서 살아남은 윈드호스트의 생존과 계속되는 사업 거래에 대해 설명합니다.

윈드호스트가 런던으로 이주한 후 금융에 집중하며 호화로운 라이프스타일로 투자자들을 끌어모으는 과정을 설명합니다.

브루노 크라스테스와 H2O의 라스 윈드호스트와의 관계, 그리고 그 후의 의심스러운 거래.

브루노 크라스테스의 배경과 H2O의 투자 전략을 소개합니다.

투자자의 관점과 H2O에 대한 신뢰도를 공유합니다.

복잡한 환매 계약과 의심스러운 채권 이동을 포함하여 H2O와 Windhorst의 거래에 대해 자세히 설명합니다.

윈드호스트의 개인 자금과 기업 자금이 섞여 있는 것에 대한 우려를 제기합니다.

윈드호스트의 영향력과 개인적, 업무적 관계의 얽힘에 대한 우려가 커지고 있습니다.

빈센트 차일리가 H2O의 대차대조표에 대한 윈드호스트의 레버리지에 대해 제기한 우려를 강조합니다.

윈드호스트가 H2O에 회사 대차대조표를 정리해 달라고 요청한 내용을 설명합니다.

크라스테스와 윈드호스트의 깊어지는 개인적, 직업적 관계를 보여줍니다.

H2O 스캔들과 그 여파, 그리고 현재 진행 중인 법적 분쟁에 대한 조사.

잠재적인 자금 세탁과 팔콘 프라이빗 뱅크 및 1MDB 스캔들과의 연관성에 대해 논의합니다.

초기 예상치를 뛰어넘는 H2O의 윈드호스트 관련 기업에 대한 노출 정도를 공개합니다.

시장 폭락과 투자자들의 패닉, 그리고 위기를 통제하려는 H2O의 시도에 대해 설명합니다.

프랑스 규제 당국의 H2O에 대한 벌금 부과와 브루노 크라스테스의 펀드 운용 금지 조치에 대해 다룹니다.