Buccaneering oil trader Marc Rich mixed controversy with exquisite timing Marc Rich's death brings to an end one of the great, colourful, controversial and buccaneering business careers in recent decades. Many of today's biggest oil and metals traders trace their roots back to Rich, who created a spot market for oil in the 1970s, wresting business away from the world's biggest oil companies. After dropping out of New York University, the Belgian-born son of Jewish refugees started his career in 1954 in the mailroom of Phillip Brothers, one of the biggest oil traders at the time. There he met Pincus "Pinky" Green, his long-term business partner, and together they built Phibro into the world's largest trader of oil, grain and metals. The pair quit the firm in the mid-1970s to set up Marc Rich + Co, a commodity trading company, in Zug, Switzerland. Their timing was nothing short of exquisite. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 saw the price of oil quadruple and demand overtake supply. As oil majors such as Shell lost their control of the world's oil, Rich stepped in to take their place, selling the commodity at a steep discount. By 1981, so much cash from outlaw regimes was flowing through Rich's empire that he bought half of Twentieth Century Fox movie studios as a tax shelter. In September 1983, Rudolph Giuliani, then the new US Attorney in Manhattan, announced that Rich and Mr Green had been indicted on charges of fraud, racketeering and evading taxes on more than $100m. According to the US House of Representatives" investigation of the subsequent pardon, Rich delivered Soviet and Iranian oil to the apartheid regime in South Africa in exchange for Namibian uranium, which was sold back to the Soviet Union. In 1984, Rich renounced his US citizenship and fled to Switzerland to avoid the US authorities. But it also meant he was unable to see his 27-year-old daughter who was in Seattle, dying from Hodgkin's Disease. He spent the last three decades of his life in the elite Swiss resort, a base for many of the world's tycoons. In 1994, Rich sold his interest in Marc Rich + Co to the company's senior traders. The company was renamed Glencore International after the sale. Glencore also held a 53 per cent interest in Südelektra Holding, which later became Xstrata, one of the world's largest and most diversified miners. In 1996, Rich divorced his wife Denise Eisenberg - a Grammy-nominated songwriter-turned-socialist who was dubbed "Lady Gatsby" by Yachting magazine - in an ill-tempered court battle. She became a large donor to the Democratic party and friend of President Bill Clinton, who granted Rich his presidential pardon on the eve of leaving office in 2001.