Bloomberg's Pastorini Profile Appears

Back at the beginning of July, I wondered where the long-awaited Bloomberg profile of Lawrence Niren (a/k/a Edward Pastorini, a/k/a Theodore Roxford) might have got to. It was promised in April – and, finally, it arrived on the last day of August, with a reasonably bland headline: "Gold Fields Bidder Takes Twisted Path From Shelter to Argentina".

The best thing about the story is the photo accompanying it, which comes from a 1995 San Francisco Chronicle piece. Niren looks utterly bonkers, a cross between Frank Zappa and Bob Druskin. (Yes, I promised you another entry in the "facial hair" category: this is it.)

The Bloomberg story is a strange combination of mockery and seriousness: "Niren says he's preparing his defense in Argentina, where he has a home, a fiancee and cats... For at least a decade, Niren, who often wears his hair in a ponytail, has floated takeover offers that lifted stock prices and then went nowhere."

The story also falls a long way short of constituting any kind of formal correction to the original Bloomberg story, which claimed that "U.S. financier Edward Pastorini may lead a bid for Gold Fields" and which sent Gold Field shares soaring. Rather than sending reporters to obscure Argentine provinces to interview the staff of a hotel where Niren once stayed, it might have been easier, quicker, and a whole lot cheaper to just run a story saying "Edward Pastorini is a fraud, and we were duped". Which is the subtext of the whole article, even if nothing quite along those lines ever appears.