Omega Advisors Inc., the $6 billion hedge fund run by Leon Cooperman, will pay $500,000 to resolve a U.S. bribery investigation into its investment of more than $100 million in Azerbaijan with Czech financier Viktor Kozeny.
Prosecutors in New York say Kozeny, while living in Aspen, cheated investors of hundreds of millions of dollars by luring them to back his failed bid to seize control of the State Oil Co. of the Azerbaijan Republic in 1998 and that Kozeny paid millions of dollars in bribes to Azeri leaders.
Kozeny, dubbed the “Pirate of Prague” in media reports, also is wanted by authorities in the Czech Republic, where he is accused of stripping Czech companies of hundreds of millions of dollars and cheating hundreds of thousands of small investors in the early 1990s.
Prosecutors in New York agreed not to charge New York-based Omega, following the 2004 guilty plea of a former executive, Clayton Lewis, who admitted conspiring to bribe Azeri leaders. Omega admitted no wrongdoing while it “acknowledges responsibility” for Lewis’ conduct, the agreement says.
“The saga relating to Omega’s 1998 investment in the privatization program in Azerbaijan has come to an end,” Cooperman said in a letter to Omega investors.
