Full Name Richard Fagan Role Businessman Name Richard Fagan | Occupation Businessman Nationality British | |
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Known for International polo player | ||
Richard Joseph Fagan (born September 1971) is a businessman who created the Kijani Commodity Fund in 2011 reported by Simon Rowe in the Business section of the Irish Independent newspaper as being at the centre of a $16bn Ponzi scheme probe. He is the captain of the Irish international polo team and also plays for Silex, Opel-Royal Salute, Badrutt's Palace Hotel and El Trebol, among others.
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Early life
Fagan was born in September 1971. He headed a family motor repair chain. In February 2006, he was a member of Los Griffos and won the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club Arena Gold Cup. Fagan also won the Junior County Cup in 2006 with the Autodex polo team. He moved to Gibraltar in 2007 to work in the territory's investing industry.
Business career
In 2011, Fagan started the Kijani Commodity Fund, which pitched investments to small commodity producers. The fund managed more than $130 million in assets and was seized by Cayman Island regulators in June 2015. He is a shareholder in Kijani Resources Ltd. According to the Wall Street Journal, Fagan's fund has been seized but at the time of writing in 2015 he has not been accused of any wrongdoing by regulators. His fund is now in liquidation and he robustly denies involvement in a fraudulent investment operation where the operator pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profits earned through legitimate sources and has not been charged with any wrongdoing. But a number of high-value managed funds linked to Fagan's network have been seized by financial regulators and put into administration to protect investor funds in recent months.
In 2012, Fagan bought a 116-foot superyacht named Ratio which sleeps around 15 people.
Polo career
By 2010, Fagan had won several international tournaments, including the XXXIX International Polo Tournament with Silex. In June 2014, Silex won the XV edition of the Andrés Parladé tournament against Powder Byrne/Blueye in overtime.
As captain of the Irish international polo team, Fagan won the silver medal in the 2014 European Polo Championships in France at the 2014 FEI World Equestrian Games. He accepted an Irish bog oak sculpture on behalf of the Irish team for winning the silver medal, which was presented by Horse Sport Ireland chairman Pat Wall and Federation of Irish Polo Clubs chairman James Kennedy. The team competed in the Land Rover International Polo Tournament and the XXXVI José Ignacio Domecq Memorial tournament at Santa María Polo Club.
In 2015, Fagan and Team Badrutt's Palace Hotel competed in the Snow Polo World Cup in St. Moritz, placing third in the event. As a member of Team Opel-Royal Salute, Fagan won the Silver Cup in Medium Goal at Land Rover International Polo Tournament. He was selected to represent Ireland in the Snow Polo World Cup 2016.