The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has spent years casting George Soros as a foreign menace, calling him an “enemy of India” whose money flows into the country to destabilise its democracy and weaken Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Senior ministers have spoken out against him, even in Parliament. Investigative agencies have raided civil society groups linked to his Open Society Foundations.
However, an investigation by Newslaundry, based on US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and Cayman Islands registry records, has found that Himayani Puri, daughter of Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, co-founded a hedge fund that was selected by Soros Fund Management LLC to manage a portion of its portfolio.
The allocation was USD 200 million, confirmed to Newslaundry by a Soros spokesperson. It ran from February 2010 to September 2012, years before the BJP’s public war on Soros began. Neither the minister, his party, nor his daughter have disclosed the connection publicly.
When Congress leader Rahul Gandhi attempted to raise the matter in the Lok Sabha in March this year, the Speaker cut short his speech amid protests from the treasury benches. The BJP has not addressed it since.
Mandate of the fund
In January 2009, three former Lehman Brothers employees – Himayani Puri, Robert Millard and Anthony Stone – launched a hedge fund called Realm Partners, structured across Delaware and the Cayman Islands. The fund was open only to “qualified purchasers,” a US legal category requiring a minimum of USD 5 million in investments.
It was not a retail product. Each of the three co-founders held between 25 and 50 per cent ownership. Realm Partners went on to raise over USD 441 million from 74 investors, with roughly two-thirds of that capital coming from offshore accounts.
At its peak, it held securities worth approximately USD 667.6 million in US-listed companies. New investor commitments ceased after February 2013 and the fund closed in 2015.
Among its most significant backers, Newslaundry found in SEC filings, was Soros Fund Management LLC, which was then managing a portfolio that peaked at USD 8.75 billion. The firm had selected 13 external managers to handle portions of its assets. Realm Partners was among them, appearing in every available quarterly filing for 2010 and 2011.
Michael Vachon, spokesperson for George Soros, confirmed the same to Newslaundry. “Our data shows that we were allocated to Realm Partners (Hedge Fund) from February 2010 to September 2012. The initial allocation was USD 200 million, which our database shows was allocated in February 2010. We redeemed the allocation in the second part of 2012.”
At current conversion rates, USD 200 million amounts to over Rs 1,867 crore.
The timing of Hardeep Puri’s dinner
Hardeep Singh Puri has stated publicly that the only time he met George Soros was at a dinner in October 2009 in New York. According to SEC filings, approximately two months after that dinner, Soros Fund Management selected his daughter’s firm to manage a slice of its portfolio.
There is no evidence of any connection between the dinner and Realm Partners receiving the mandate, and the timing may be coincidental. Such arrangements are routine in institutional finance.
But for a party that has weaponised the Soros name in domestic politics, the silence is notable.
| 
