Our favourite US financier is back. Mainly it would seem because Bloomberg simply cannot stop flogging their long dead, and rotting, horse.
Felix Salmon has spotted that the long-promised profile of the mysterious Gold Fields bidder, Edward Pastorini, appeared at the end of last month. Except he’s not Edward Pastorini – he’s Lawrence Niren, self-confessed “unbelieveable” liar and floater of high-profile takeover offers which have precisely no substance.
The US authorities are onto him after Bloomberg in April reported that the US financier might lead a bid for GoldFields, the $12.5bn miner, sending its shares up as much as 11 per cent. We were sceptical – and as a result provoked a barrage of irate emails from the purported Gold Fields bidder.
Our be-facial-haired friend Mr Niren is preparing his defence in Argentina where Bloomberg tells us he “has a home, a fiancee and cats.”
The real Pastorini, we learn in the Bloomberg profile on which the newswire has employed three named reporters, is actually a New Jersey musician who’s known Niren since at least the 1970s. He plays in a rock bank called the 101 Crustaceans and Niren has also apparently identified him as a step-cousin.
Other gems include that Mr Niren has travelled on Greyhound buses (which is considered sufficiently important information so as to appear in the first paragraph) and that, if you hadn’t guessed from his picture, he’s a Beatles fan.
Niren regards Lennon reverently, friends and relatives say. In 1990, he used the words of a Lennon song in a note Katherina, his ex-wife, had filed in their divorce case.
“You may wonder: If I’ve loved you, how could I have lied to you about things?” he wrote. “Like the song says, `Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey.”’
We urge you to read the entire profile in all its lurid and frankly insane detail.