Billionaire Edouard Carmignac is one of France's richest men, and his €50bn company, Carmignac Gestion, is now the second-largest holder of Irish bonds after Michael Hasenstab at Franklin Templeton.
The Rolling Stones played a private gig for his top clients recently and he plays polo where he hangs out with Prince Harry and Harcourt Developments' Pat Doherty (the Donegal man who is one of Nama's top builders).
Carmignac is a renowned art collector, owning works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Tom Friedman. His son Charles plays guitar in the band Moriarty, and his daughter Lucrece is an actress.
The legendary fund manager is also a vocal critic of the French government, taking out full-page newspaper ads to slam its "almost suicidal" financial policies and dissing the introduction of a controversial wealth tax for the super rich.
The private Rolling Stones concert in Paris last October is reputed to have cost €10m. Bouffant Scottish singer Rod Stewart has also played a private gig for Carmignac's clients.
Carmignac Gestion has massively increased its exposure to Irish bonds, more than doubling its disclosed holdings of 3.9 per cent bonds that mature in March 2023 and also adding to its portfolio of 5.5 per cent debts due in October 2017, data compiled by Bloomberg shows.
Carmignanc's plunge into Irish bonds has been spectacularly successful. Irish bonds jumped 11 per cent in 2011, according to the Bloomberg Ireland Sovereign Bond Index. They rose 30 per cent last year and a further 5.7 per cent in the first half of this year.
The French fund manager has starred in the Queen's Cup polo tournament, which has brought him in contact with Donegal builder Doherty, whose Harcourt Developments has sponsored the event in recent years. Doherty, the Donegal builder who as a young man appeared in The Beatles' video for Hey Jude, put together the enormous Park West complex in west Dublin and has been developing the iconic Titanic Quarter project in Belfast.
The final year's match was dedicated to Ian Wooldridge of Harcourt Developments, and Guards chief executive Charles Stisted, who tragically died in a helicopter accident.