Florian Homm

Investment activities

Florian Homm was born on 7 October 1959 in Oberursel, Germany. He began his working career at Merrill Lynch. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1987. He worked for Fidelity Investments and Julius Bär before founding the Value Management & Research AG (VMR) in Germany in 1993.

In 2004 he invested in stock of the German soccer club Borussia Dortmund, through his Cayman Island-based company. With a financial commitment of 20 million euros, he basically saved the club and also contributed to the overthrow of the club management by means of the conditions attached to the payment.

In 2005 he co-founded Absolute Capital Management Holdings (ACMH), a hedge-fund company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which was listed on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange. During this time, Homm enjoyed a great deal of media attention due to the high yields of the hedge fund and was named Hedge Fund Leader of The Year by the investment magazine Alternative Investment News. ACMH managed around three billion euros at the peak of this period.

According to his autobiography, Homm in 2006 profitably invested in the Berlin brothel Artemis.

Homm again gained much media attention in 2007 when he demanded that the German telecommunications provider freenet AG be split up. In addition, he also took a stake in the TUI travel agency.

Resignation, charges and pursuit

In September 2007, Homm abruptly announced his resignation as the head of Absolute Capital Management and disappeared.

After his resignation, Homm was accused by the remaining management of his company of having valued many of the assets much higher than their actual value. He was supposedly on the run with over 150 million euro. The Absolute Capital Management stock lost 93% of its value up until June 2008.

On 25 February 2011, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed civil charges against Florian Homm and Todd M. Ficeto. According to the complaint, Homm's various companies engaged in secretly coordinated bogus trades of penny stocks in order to drive up the stocks' prices and thereby the value of his hedge fund, a technique known as "portfolio pumping".

According to a private investigator, betrayed investors have put out a bounty on Homm. Any information leading to his capture will be rewarded with 1.5 million euros. Investigators are following up on several leads. It is suspected, among other things, that Homm is in Venezuela because a few months before his getaway he was shot in Caracas. In the official story, ordinary muggers tried to steal his watch. Presumably, Homm was already preparing his getaway then.

On March 6, 2013, Homm was criminally charged with investment fraud in federal court in Los Angeles. According to the complaint, he had caused $200 million in losses. On March 8, he was arrested in Florence, Italy, where he had gone to meet his ex-wife and daughter, who live in Florida. The Italian police had been tipped off by the FBI.

Homm's lawyers fought extradition by pointing to his suffering from multiple sclerosis. After an expert testified that the disease was at an early to intermediate stage and did not prevent incarceration, the Court of Cassation in Rome ruled on January 9, 2014 that he could be extradited. On June 23, 2014 Homm was released from prison in Italy, after a court ruled that the period he could be held for extradition had expired. He returned to his native Germany. Germany does not extradite German citizens.

Books

In 2012, as part of the planned publication of his book (English title: Rogue Financier), whose profit is being donated by Homm to the Liberia Renaissance Foundation – a Swiss charitable association aimed at improving the education and opportunities for advancement of Liberian school children –, Florian Homm took part in interviews with the German publications Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stern and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 7 November 2012, in which he described his rise, fall and new start. On the same day, the Financial Times Deutschland and the German economic magazine Wirtschaftswoche published an interview in which he denied most of the accusations against him.

Parallel to articles in The New York Times and Financial Times, in which he spoke about his return to Germany, Homm published his book in English (title: Rogue Financier). Meanwhile, in Germany, in the week beginning on 19 November 2012, his autobiography was 27th in the Spiegel best-seller list, 11th in the Manager Magazine best-seller list January 2013, and was listed as one of the 35 best non-fiction books in 2012 by lovely books – the largest online German literary portal. It was also among the top 40 best-selling books of the year in the Manager Magazine’s business-book best-seller list, 2012

Personal life

His great uncle is the former German mail-order tycoon, dressage competitor, and sports functionary Josef Neckermann.

Florian Homm is 6-foot 7 inches tall and a former German junior national league basketball player. In the mid 1980s, he played basketball in the German national league for the Osnabrücker BC Giants club.

Florian Homm is one of the founders of the global health initiative Maximum Impact Medicine, dedicated to fighting life-threatening diseases in third world countries.

He was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000; his sister died from the disease in 2006.

Upon his release from Italian prison in June 2014, Homm speaks openly about his faith and conversion. He spoke at the College for Applied Management (Hochschule für Angewandtes Management, Erding) before approximately 300 students in November 2014. Homm has been interviewed extensively on his lifestyle change and conversion. He expresses his devotion to the Holy Mother and his mission in a YouTube video. Homm says his life is dedicated to make a little book containing messages of the Holy Mother better known. Homm states these inspiring messages changed and saved his life during prison in Italy. His personal testimony and devotion to the Holy Mother, as well as several charitable projects, are available for public scrutiny on his personal website.