Marc Rich

Marc Rich, who has died aged 78, was a financier and wheeler dealer who left Belgium to escape the Nazis and rose to become the billionaire king of commodities.

Mr Rich's connections to the rich and powerful not only made him fabulously wealthy but when he was indicted for fraud, racketeering and tax evasion on a grand scale, they helped secure him a pardon from Bill Clinton, hours before the then President of the US left office. That triggered a political firestorm from critics who alleged Mr Rich bought his pardon through donations that his ex-wife Denise had made to the Democratic Party.

Throughout his career at the pinnacle of high finance, Mr Rich was known as a man who could deliver the big deals thanks to personal relationships he had forged with powerful figures around the world. He cultivated contacts with powerful politicians – in the Middle East as well as the US – and used those ties to make billions, often when it seemed all doors were closed.

During the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, he used his Middle East contacts to purchase crude oil from Iran and Iraq and made a fortune selling it to American companies.

In 1981 he and a partner bought 20th Century Fox and three years later sold his interest to Rupert Murdoch for $250 million.

However, in 1983, while in Switzerland, Mr Rich was indicted by a US federal grand jury on more than 50 counts of fraud, racketeering, trading with Iran during the US Embassy hostage crisis and evading more than $48m in income taxes. At the time it was the largest tax evasion case in US history and could have earned him more than 300 years in prison.

Although the Swiss refused to arrest or extradite Mr Rich, he stayed on the FBI's Most Wanted list, narrowly escaping capture in Finland, Germany, Britain and Jamaica, until Mr Clinton granted him a pardon on January 20, 2001 – the day he handed over the keys of the White House to George W Bush.

Last-minute presidential pardons are not uncommon in the US, but this one raised a furore. Critics believed the case showed justice means one thing for ordinary people and another for powerful insiders.

Mr Rich had other advocates. For years influential Israelis, including ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the former chief of the Mossad spy agency, Shabtai Shavit, had been urging Mr Clinton to pardon Mr Rich, who over two decades contributed up to $80m to Israeli hospitals, museums, symphonies and to the absorption of immigrants.

At the time, Mr Rich's lawyers were urging the US to drop the tax evasion case. When the Justice Department refused to negotiate, Mr Rich's attorneys turned to Mr Clinton.

Federal authorities investigated but found no evidence of wrongdoing. Mr Clinton also denied wrongdoing and said he acted on advice by legal experts not connected to the trader.

Nevertheless, the US Attorney General Eric Holder, who was Deputy Attorney General under Mr Clinton, told a House committee weeks after the President's decree that if he had known all the facts of the case, he would not have recommended to the President that he grant the pardon.

Mr Rich was born in Antwerp, Belgium. His Jewish family fled from the Nazis to the US, where he went to school and college in New York. After dropping out of college, he went to work for the commodity traders Phillips Brothers, now called Phibro, in New York. He quickly got the knack of trading and in 1967 was sent by the company to work in Madrid, where he met Pincus "Pinky" Green, his future partner.

In 1973, Mr Rich and Mr Green left the company after arguing over the size of their bonuses. They set up Marc Rich and Co, based in the Swiss town of Zug, where low taxes have made it one of the world's oil trading centres.

Business boomed. Mr Rich specialised in acting as a middle man for purchases in global trouble spots such as Iran, apartheid-era South Africa or Cuba and Libya during US trade embargoes. The pair were the first traders to use short-term purchases, now known as the spot market, to make big money quickly. Buying large volumes when the price was low, they were able to control the market when prices rose.

With Mr Rich in Switzerland, his companies pleaded guilty to the US charges. "It's an unfortunate situation," Mr Rich said. "But the question is, was there crime? And I'm saying I don't think so."

He added that as Marc Rich and Co was a Swiss company, it was legal for the firm to do business with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

Mr Rich worked on making himself popular by becoming a major philanthropist, giving money to the arts and charities in the hope of building good contacts and guarding against extradition. He renounced his US citizenship and became a citizen of Israel and Spain.

He earned the hatred of US unions during the 1990-92 Ravenswood Aluminum Corp strike in West Virginia. His company was a part-owner of Ravenswood Aluminum, whose workers accused Mr Rich of locking 1500 steelworkers out of the plant when their contract expired and hiring replacement workers without negotiating.

In 1993 Mr Rich sold his own company – Glencore, now the world's largest commodity trader – and set up a new firm, Marc Rich and Co Holding, also based in Zug. Although a Russian firm, Crown Resources, tried to buy its commodities unit in 2001, the buyout fell through and Mr Rich remained active in the trading business. After spending several years in Zug, he moved to La Villa Rose on the shores of Lake Lucerne in nearby Meggen. He also owned property in St Moritz and Marbella.

He married for a second time, to German-born Gisela Rossi, in 1998. They divorced in 2005. He is survived by two daughters, Ilona and Danielle.