Robert Agostinelli

Robert Francesco Agostinelli (born 21 May 1953), also known as Roberto Agostinelli, is a billionaire financier who runs the private equity firm Rhone Group with his partner Steven Langman. He holds extremely right-wing views and has supported Zionist and neoconservative causes. He is one of the Founder Members of the Friends of Israel Initiative.

Education and career

Agostinelli was awarded a BA from St. John Fisher College in 1976 and an MBA from Columbia University in 1981. From 1981-1982 he worked for the wealthy financier Jacob Rothschild who had recently broken off from the Rothschild family bank. He then joined Goldman Sachs where he worked for five years in Mergers and Acquisitions. He was Senior Managing Director of investment banking at Lazard Frères in New York from 1987 to 1996. At Lazard Frères he worked with Steven Langman with whom he established Rhone Group in 1997.

Connections to right-wing politicians

Under pressure from the French media, Nicolas Sarkozy admitted to Le Monde in 2007 that Agostinelli had paid the rent on a luxury villa for him during his controversial 2006 holiday to the United States. Part of the rent was also paid by Agnes Cromback, president of the jewellers Tiffany-France. A man convicted of attacking an associate of Agostinelli’s in a bar fight has claimed that Agostinelli used his connections with Sarkozy against him. Lawyers for John Augustin Washington, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the assault, played a phone message Agostinelli left him at an appeal saying: ‘Dear John, I want you to remember my name because you are going to remember it all your life! … the hunting dogs are after you … they will transform your life into a puff of smoke!’

In 2008 Agostinelli provided funding to the Presidential Campaigns of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

Views

Agostinelli has described himself as ‘a committed classical liberal’ but he holds extreme right-wing views on economics and social issues. He claimed in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that the UK was ‘under attack from within’ by ‘Islamofascists who have been accommodated here for so long are home-grown and empowered in the belief that Britain is preordained to be a western caliphate.’ Similarly in a letter to the neoconservative magazine Commentary, he referred to the ‘social chaos’ caused by ‘a growing wave of immigration, dominated by North African Muslim youths who have failed to integrate into mainstream society.’

He has praised right-wing politicians like Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy but has been highly critical of some right-wing figures he regards as too liberal. He has called David Cameron and George Osborne ‘weak [and] illiberal in their values’ and dismissed the former a ‘feeble nature[d]… pretend-Tory prime minister’.

Agostinelli blames the post-2007 financial crisis not on financiers (like himself) but on ‘incompetent and costly government intrusion,’ reminiscent of when, ‘the Left ran roughshod over our liberties in the 1970s’. He considers Barak Obama to be an agent of Marxists who have ‘finally stuck the raw edge of their poisoned sword into the heart of the glorious genie of capitalism and freedom.’ He has referred to Obama as a ‘soulless serpent from the deep’. He has referred to the left generally as ‘a cancer that needs to be eradicated’.