In September 2007, almost a year after New Zealand–born billionaire Richard Chandler founded investment firm Orient Global in Singapore, he made a rare appearance at a forum on social responsibility. Abandoning his penchant for privacy, Chandler outlined the link between giving and investing.
“We start to ask the question, where would the incremental dollar achieve the greatest return?” said Chandler. “Charity is good, performance philanthropy is better, and social investment is best.”
Chandler attended the global executive summit in Singapore again the following year -- and then dropped back out of public view, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its July/August issue. He doesn’t speak to the press. Current and former employees of his firm, now called Chandler Corp., don’t talk about him, citing nondisclosure agreements. Executives of most companies in which Chandler invests deal only with his staff.“I never met him and I don’t know him,” says Indian billionaire Malvinder Singh, whose Fortis Healthcare Ltd. sold its entire stake in Vietnamese hospital company Hoan My Medical Corp. to Chandler Corp. for $80 million in August 2013, according to Fortis’s statement.
Behind the silence, Chandler, 55, is amassing a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated at $3.7 billion on June 18. Energy-related companies account for at least $1.2 billion of his wealth.
