The billionaire stock speculator announced in June this year that he was retiring from public life.
Hungarian-born businessman and stock speculator György Soros (born György Schwartz) celebrates his 93rd birthday today, who announced in June that he would retire and leave the management of the empire he built to his son, Alexander Soros.
Born in 1930, György Soros, who later called himself a philanthropist, lived through World War II in the Hungarian capital with a child's mind and false papers. World War and the Holocaust, while
according to his own admission, he participated in the confiscation of Jewish assets
alongside a ministry official bribed by Soros' father to pose as his son's godfather. According to his own admission, he did not see the connections as a child, but the events did not cause any problems for him anyway. He didn't even feel guilty because he knew and saw that his Jewish compatriots were being dragged away by the shooters.
The network is being built
Having thus survived the conflagration, he emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1947, where he studied economics and graduated in 1952 from the London School of Economics. However, he did not stay long in Europe, in 1956 he moved to the USA, where he began his financial career. In 1969, he founded the Quantum Investment Fund, which played a leading role in his later speculative operations.
Soros slowly built his empire, until in 1983 he founded the famous Soros Foundation, which expanded its activities to Hungary. Within this framework, he financially supported numerous associations and organizations "in order to promote the democratic transition", and then
In 1991, he founded the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest.
Soros' organizations later expanded into a network and are now known as the Open Society Foundations.
Alex Soros greeted the speculator with this picture on the occasion of Father's Day
Source: Twitter/Alex Soros
Profit at the expense of others
However, in the meantime, one thing or another happened in the financial field, Soros, who is considered to be the 128th richest person in the world in 2022, showed his face as a stock speculator several times. In 1988, through Quantum, he obtained an illegal profit of 2.2 million dollars through insider trading, speculating on the shares of the French bank Societé Générale, for which he was convicted in France in 2006.
On September 16, 1992, taking advantage of the weakening of the pound, he crashed the British currency. Speculating on a fall in the exchange rate, he made a profit of 1 billion dollars. In 1997, it also took action in East Asia, triggering a financial crisis, until it "arrived" in Hungary on October 9, 2008 and
attacked the leading domestic bank, OTP, through Soros Fund Management.
At the end of the business day, by short-selling OTP's shares, he earned $675,000. However, the investigation by the State Supervision of Financial Institutions (PSZÁF) shed light on the speculation and fined the Soros half a billion forints due to illegal market influencing activity.
Ideological warfare
Proclaiming the ideology of an open society, György Soros and his network, however, gained a strong influence not only in the financial but also in the political field, among other things, in Europe and thus in the institutions of the European Union, whose leaders he met several times. When the migration crisis erupted in 2015, Soros provided guidelines for dealing with illegal immigration in a study, stating, among other things, that
the European Union must prepare to receive approximately one million migrants every year.
In addition to the migrant issue, Soros has repeatedly clashed with the Hungarian government in recent years: in June 2021, for example, he called Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the founder of a mafia state.
At that time, he also explained that when he founded the CEU 30 years earlier, he believed that the European Union was the embodiment of an open society, but things have taken a turn and are moving in the wrong direction, authoritarian systems are gaining more and more ground.
According to the Hungarian government, Soros, through the NGOs and other organizations financed by him, continues to strive to achieve his own goals, insulting the values of European nations or the consequences of the influx of migrants on the continent.
Alexander Soros, who recently took control of the Soros empire, is perhaps even more active than his father was when he was young - at least in the political field. As can be seen from his photos, he has access to leading politicians, as well as to current US President Joe Biden. The billionaire's son has expressed his opinion on the Russian-Ukrainian war several times with the aim of dragging everyone into the conflict.
Featured image: MTI/EPA/Alejandro García
