The world is better off without Marc Rich – but his heirs still control the price of almost everything

Marc Rich, the godfather of global commodity trading who died last week, ‘deserves credit as one of the greatest creators and sharers of wealth in business history’, wrote James Breiding in the Financial Times in a counterblast to obituarists who had painted the secretive Swiss-based billionaire and former fugitive from US justice as ‘a flamboyant, tax-evading crook’. Bill Clinton certainly saw the better angel in Rich’s nature, granting a presidential pardon for his embargo-busting dealings with Iran against all precedent and advice. But leaving aside the unpatriotic oil trades and the unpaid taxes (not to mention the former Mrs Rich’s timely donation to the Clinton Library), is Breiding right to argue that the Rich legacy — the explosive growth of commodity markets and consequent prosperity of resource-rich nations — was for the good of the world, and we should thank him for it?

Well no, not really. Long-term supply and demand of carbon fuels and industrial metals would have found other ways to meet without Rich’s intermediation. The big oil companies that ran their own global market before he muscled in on it in the mid-1970s may not always have been paragons of corporate virtue, but they were never as chillingly amoral as he was.

‘You can’t run a business on sympathies otherwise you’d be hampered,’ was one of his sayings. ‘They wanted money and I wanted their commodities,’ he observed of the vicious regimes with which he conducted what Breiding (in his book Swiss Made) tellingly called ‘intimate relationships’. When someone asked Rich what gave him a buzz, the answer was not his daughters or his Picassos or his lovely view of Lake Lucerne, but ‘I like making money.’