Mansoor Ijaz | |
|---|---|
 Mansoor Ijaz in Monaco, 7 July 2007 | |
| Born | Musawer Mansoor Ijaz August 1961 (age 63) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | 1979–1983 University of Virginia 1983–1985 M.I.T. 1983–1986 Harvard-MIT M.E.M.P. |
| Occupation(s) | Hedge fund management Venture capitalist News analyst and opinion writer Freelance diplomacy |
| Parent(s) | Mujaddid A. Ijaz (1937–1992) Lubna Razia Ijaz (1936-2017) |
Mansoor Ijaz (born August 1961) is a Pakistani-American venture financier and hedge-fund manager. He is founder and chairman of Crescent Investment Management Ltd, a New York and London-based investment firm that operates CARAT, a proprietary trading system developed by Ijaz in the late 1980s. His venture investments included unsuccessful efforts in 2013 to acquire a stake in Lotus F1, a Formula One team. In the 1990s, Ijaz and his companies were contributors to Democratic Party institutions as well as the presidential candidacies of Bill Clinton.
During the first Clinton term, when the U.S. had severed official ties with Sudan, Ijaz opened informal communications links between Washington and Khartoum in an effort to gain access to Sudanese intelligence data on Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, who were then operating from Sudan. Ijaz was involved in efforts to broker a ceasefire in Kashmir in 2000–2001, and in the Memogate controversy, in which former Pakistani envoy Husain Haqqani allegedly used him to deliver a memorandum to senior U.S. officials in order to thwart an attempted coup by the Pakistani military after bin Laden was killed.